Mailbox Products - Media release
A room of calm

Presenting Mailbox Products in a whole new light.

Liverpool's LightNight festival

In an event that presents Mailbox products in a completely new and unexpected way, lighting designer Tracey Gibbs has used a selection of the company’s plastic containers as the basis for her immersive installation ‘A Room of Calm’, commissioned as part of Liverpool’s LightNight festival. The installation uses light to transform not only the space but also the audience themselves, employing carefully selected tones from the colour spectrum that have been shown to calm the mind, slow down the heart rate, lower blood pressure and reduce anxiety. Tracey chose to use plastic as her medium because it diffuses light so well, creating a soft, gentle, soothing effect that invites the audience to reach out to the boxes of light, interacting with them and experiencing the installation through touch as well as sight. Her work elevates an apparently utilitarian item to produce an artwork by bringing out the beauty in something we see around us every day, transforming it from within.

Stacking containers

A Room of Calm features 45 white Mailbox stacking containers of various shapes and sizes, some arranged at floor level, some elevated, lit to create glowing cubes of light that gradually come to life as more colours flood the space. The installation is presented in a long corridor through which the audience undertakes a guided sensory journey. It is situated within a rarely seen temple-like space in the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), the performing arts university co-founded by Paul McCartney, adding to the sense of peace and other-worldliness that anyone visiting it experiences. Tracey designed it to be a response to the notion that our contemporary world is a relentless and frenetic place where we experience ever less physical contact with our environment and the people around us. A Room of Calm is an opportunity to play an active role in one of the many and varied events taking place during LightNight and participate in the shared experience of reflecting and relaxing within a nurturing space.

Attention to design

This installation encourages a new respect for an everyday material, celebrating the beauty it can facilitate and the possibilities it offers. Tracey chose to use Mailbox products in her installation after visiting the company’s showroom and being impressed by the attention to design, quality and detail in the products she saw around her. All the containers Tracey has used will be returned to Mailbox when the installation ends, to be regranulated and recycled and continue their life as a materials handling solution.