AGB Events Helps Light Up Cairns Festival

For the third year in a row, Sydney-based creators, curators and producers of iconic celebrations AGB Events have staged a projection mapping show - “Migratory Patterns” - onto the iconic Cairns City Library for the Cairns Festival, for whom the company acted as creative consultant.

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The Cairns Festival was founded by the Cairns Regional Council in 1961. Since then, the overriding vision has been to deliver a bright, bold and challenging program spanning visual and performing arts, culture and entertainment while showcasing the city's key cultural precincts, nurturing local talent and driving tourism. Regional Queensland's most significant and fastest-growing community event, Cairns Festival has come a long way and now takes advantage of state-of-the-art lighting, automation and audiovisual technologies.

Since 2015, the Cairns City Library has been transformed with projection artworks that speak to the culture, history and tropical lifestyle of North Queensland.

As ever, AGB Events worked with a celebrated local artist – on this occasion, Hayley Gillespie. Born in London in 1972, Hayley relocated to Cairns in 1996. She has been a professional artist since 1989, in a variety of guises, and has drawn inspiration from Australia`s colours and lifestyle.

For this year’s festival, AGB Events developed a collaborative projection artwork titled “Migratory Patterns”, transforming Hayley's remarkable paintings into an animated story, projected onto the facade of Cairns City Library. The theme covers the rich cultural gifts brought to the region, as people from all over the world have called Cairns home. The story of Cairns is one of union; a place of meeting, sharing of cultural knowledge and arrival.

“It was a thrill and an honour to be asked back for the third time to help bring the Cairns Festival to life, and to be able to contribute to it being one of the foremost such events in the country,” said Anthony Bastic, Founder and CEO of AGB Events. “It’s a joy to work with talented artists like Hayley, and help give their work new dimensions and a new dynamism by combining it with cutting edge technology, pushing boundaries to deliver something that is completely compelling.”

“Migratory Patterns” – part of the City Lights program, which engages local and national artists to create large scale projections to transform Cairns through projection mapping and soundscapes - was shown nightly between 7:00pm - 11:00pm from August 30 to September 21.

AGB Events has also made a significant contribution to many other high-profile cultural celebrations, including delivering the Vivid Sydney light show for the past 10 years, and the Parrtjima light festival at Alice Springs.