Dan Shields plays with yarn. That’s his real job. And in reality, that means he does a lot more than just play with yarn.
“I have to be everything,” Shields said. “I’m a little bit of an engineer, an artist — I wear many hats.”
On Friday, he was in Covington, climbing up ladders to install a light display with around 900 yards of yarn. It’s got enough reflective material to give you flashbacks to BLINK.
“This is just another day at the office,” Shields said from the top of a ladder 10 feet in the air. “It’s kind of crazy that I get paid to play with yarn.”
Out of his van, he grabbed a black trash bag.
“This is the whole installation right here,” Shields said.
Shields was helping an ambitious new music festival — one organizers hope it will replace what our region lost when Bunbury left.
“It will react to the fluorescent yarn, and you won’t be able to see the beams, but you’ll see the effects on it,” Shields said. “So it will look like the yarn is just lighting up on its own.”
All in a tunnel on Pike Street.
“The tunnel is just this landmark that’s never used,” said Jared Metz, one of the co-founders of Arcade Music Fest.
He lives nearby, and he hates that the tunnel is always locked at night. Especially when he’s drinking with friends.
“When you’re bar-hopping, you can’t walk through it,” Metz said. “I wanna bar-hop and walk through the tunnel so that’s what I’m doing.”
It’s where this idea came from.
Now, the festival spans several blocks with eight venues, more than 80 musical artists and 40-plus vendors and artists like Shields.
“This is just one of the most ambitious projects that’s happened in Covington in a long time,” Metz said.