If there is one town for art fans to head to on Eyre Peninsula, it has to be Tumby Bay.
In March of every year, since 2018, they hold the Colour Tumby Festival, where street artists decorate and liven up spaces around town, turning them from bare walls into bright works of art.

Tumby has been on my radar for years to visit for this purpose and to make it extra special, this year the town also participated in Illuminate Tumby, part of the illuminate Adelaide festival.

Taking a detour from our planned trail around the Eyre Peninsula was always a given, to make sure we could see this art installation while it was on, and we weren’t disappointed.

Illuminate Tumby was a mix of illuminated street art, augmented reality which needed an app and scanning of a QR code to bring 3D sculptures to life, and projections to music. There was also an illuminated dog park, made up of neon tubing dogs, trees and more, a real hit especially with the kids. Nothing was left out including a neon cat up a tree which a dog was peeing on, and even a neon dog which had left behind a nice pile of neon poo!

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Amongst the illuminated street art were murals by Elle, Smug, Lisa King, Vans the Omega and more. There was an interesting projection which involved being something of a voyeur and standing on the outside looking in through a louvered window.

There were three different scenes to watch before ‘the people on the inside’, noticed the audience watching on and closed the louvres, before they would open again and the next scene would play out. Very Clever.

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Perhaps the most amazing, mind blowing event though, was the projection ‘Big Picture Series’ by Filip Roca. During the day a nondescript shed in the backstreets of Tumby Bay became a wow show at night. I can only try to describe it as Pink Floyd meets Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene album, in a collision of light, sound and drama. Absolutely awesome.

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Illuminate Tumby was on from 6-9pm every night during the festival which ran this year from the 13^th to the 21^st of August.

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There is plenty more art to love around Tumby Bay during the day and this relaxed small town on the bay is one we loved, so much so, we revisited on our return to the planned tour of Eyre Peninsula. In a future blog I will show more reasons to visit Tumby.

Cheers

Glenys