My friend John Varah, who has died aged 67 of heart failure, was one of Britain’s most influential community artists. A cultural anarchist dedicated to creating festivals, parades and illuminated spectacles, he was an inventor as much as an artist, surrounded by coils of wire, soldering irons and improbable contraptions as he coaxed ideas into life.
Over the years he created and curated a number of popular events, including the annual Burning the Clocks ritual in Brighton, in which, on the winter solstice, thousands of people walk through the city carrying handmade paper-and-willow lanterns containing their hopes and dreams for the year.
The procession culminates on the beach, where the lanterns are ceremonially burned, followed by a fire and pyrotechnic show. It is quintessential John: light, ritual, participation and spectacle, but with the community making the event rather than merely watching it.
His greatest legacy, indeed, was the influence he had on those who worked with him. Impatient with convention but supremely patient with people, he instilled confidence in his co-workers and made many of them realise that they could be artists too. The spectacle mattered, but the transformation of the person mattered more.
John was born in Rayners Lane, London, to Phyllis (nee Goff) and William Varah, who were both teachers. One of his father’s brothers was Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans, to whom John was particularly close.
After attending John Lyon school in Harrow, and Wycombe grammar school in Buckinghamshire, he briefly joined the civil service, working for four years as a national insurance inspector in London. But routine life did not hold him for long, and he left that job to spend six months in India, where he became fascinated by spectacular public rituals, lantern-lit carnivals and celebrations – elements that became central to his artistic practice.
Returning to Britain in 1986, he formed Industrial & Domestic, a touring theatre company, with four old friends, and later became a tutor at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, teaching theatre lighting, while working on a freelance basis on his various projects.
Quickly grasping how public arts funding could enable artists to work directly with communities, John became adept at devising ambitious ideas that required comparatively modest sums, paying himself a small sum from each of his ventures and living modestly so that he could continue to do what he loved.
Eventually, in 2001, he became artistic director of Same Sky, a Brighton-based charity focused on creating community events.
Through Same Sky he worked over the next quarter of a century on countless projects, many of them in Sussex, including Glow Wild, a large-scale winter illumination trail through the landscape of Kew’s wild botanic gardens in Wakehurst, the Whispering Woods choral event in the lighted woods of St Roche’s Arboretum near Chichester and in the village of Bignor Park, and most recently the Cultural Quarter project in Crawley, a running programme of pop-up events.
He also worked as a pyrotechnics consultant for the 2011 Commonwealth Games and helped to shape the celebrations that marked Brighton and Hove becoming a city in 2001.
In 2008 John married the artist Hazel Malpass, who helped him on many of his projects. She survives him, along with their daughters, Clara and Jasmine, four grandchildren and his brother Mark.
