REPORTER 031


Left ‘I do call myself a lighting designer and we are a lighting design studio,’ says Hughes


Above Her work has been seen at cultural institutions such as Somerset House and the Malmo Opera House


ZERLINA HUGHES is one of the UK’s most creative talents in the lighting design arena, working with some of the largest cultural institutions such as the V&A, The British Library, The British Museum, The Natural History Museum, The Courtauld Gallery and The National Portrait Gallery. She has over 25 years’ experience, not only in the fields of architecture and design, but across theatre, opera and film, and founded her company, Studio ZNA, to build a team of specialists who could offer a unique combination of technical, creative and cultural knowledge and design illumination. Hughes talks about her career and route into the ‘sensory’ focused profession, some of the challenges faced by lighting designers, and how the profession is growing into an ever more established and needed design component of the built environment. Responding to a question about some of the


misconceptions associated with lighting design, Hughes says: ‘I do call myself a lighting designer and we are a lighting design studio. And we


practise lighting design, but I think it’s a good question [to raise] because often a secondary question is, “oh, so do you design lights i.e. fittings, or what is it that you do?” And, of course, we’re not product designers – although we do design specials as part of our process – but we design schemes as part of the built environment, whatever that environment may be.’ Historically, people sidestep into the


profession from different sectors, often not knowing it even exists until a later point in their career. For Hughes, her path was clearer after first studying at Goldsmiths College and then undertaking her Masters at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, before finding a unique home for her skills in lighting design. ‘It was really quite early on,’ she says. ‘When I was as an undergraduate at Goldsmiths I discovered that you could create these scenographies just with light. And I absolutely kind of fell in love with it. [Lighting] was more this kind of sensory sort of construction, as I call it… [having access] to good equipment and staff, who encouraged


PETER KELLEHER


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