Royal Opera House - Deloitte Ignite Festival 2015

In 2015 Mark worked closely alongside Ali Pretty as the associate designer of a large silk installation for the Royal Opera House's Deloitte Ignite Festival. Mark produced CAD drawings to design the layout of the installation and worked with Ali's hand drawings to computerise the illustrations into 11m designs.

The installation took the form of 26 huge silk banners, 12 that were hand painted and illustrated a visual history of the Royal Opera House. Each of the 11m long banners focused on a different element of the Royal Opera House’s past and present, from the evolving architecture of its three theatres to its world-renowned productions of opera and ballet, to the people that make them happen.

The silks took almost 750 hours to wax and paint, with a team of volunteers working at Kinetika’s studios, and were hung in the magnificent vaulted glass ceiling of the Paul Hamlyn Hall in Covent Garden, London, for the first weekend of September 2015 during the Deloitte Ignite Festival.

Mark was incredibly pleased to work on such a prestigious commission and the installation received a huge amount of positive media with the ROH being very impressed with the piece of work.

Designer: Ali Pretty

Associate Designer: Mark Forrest

Assisting Artists: Jacci Todd, Julie Kalache

Sewing and Finishing: Kitty Power, Hazel Corcoran