'Improvisation'
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Installation (mirror, LED light)
Year: 2013
Size: 740 x 740 x 100mm
Note: Elam Graduate Show 2013, Mondrian Building, Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland
Artist Statement:
'light creates the power and magic of a painting, its richness, eloquence,sensuality, and beauty.' [1]
- Otto Piene, Light Ballet
I was inspired by the process of long exposure photographic techniques to create images, which I used by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. Man Ray's 'Space Writing' (self-portrait)[2]influenced me to think that light could be used as a painting medium instead of traditional techniques. I had thought that the photographic 'light painting' had limitations in that it was only represented in two-dimensional surface. Photography captures the action of tracks of light moving, but does not show the actual light itself. Otto Piene's Light Ballet[3]gave me a new way to think about the possibility of using a spatial construction to make my work. Piene said, ‘Moholy’s Light-Space Modulator was the unmistakable forebear of light ballets’[4]and that 'the instruments were my (Piene) primitive light instruments, which ingood time I turned into light sculptures and light machines.' [5]
The idea of my works are to convert the photographic technique to be a painting concept that which is light itself is to be the medium. I use the elements of lights, colour and mirrors to create the images in my works differing from traditional painters use pigmented paints to create their images. I want to use my work to investigate the relationship between the viewer's body and inherent beauty of point and line in a dark space. As Kandinsky said: 'Everystill and every moving point (= line) became equally alive and revealed its should to me.’[6]
The works are the output of my ongoing research with the use of light as the medium to interpret painting, but they are not necessarily to be read as 'paintings'. Viewers can go into the dark space and to experience the immersive experience.
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[1]Light Ballet, 1928, Cambridge, MA
[2]Man Ray ‘Space Writing’(self-portrait), 1935, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick
[3]Light Ballet, 1928, Cambridge, MA
[4]Light Ballet, 1928, Cambridge, MA
[5]Light Ballet, 1928, Cambridge, MA
[6]Kandinsky, 1993, Thames and Hudson,London
