9th March 2024 – Open Night comes around again
It felt great to be back in the groove of being involved in another Open Night in March 2024 – now two in a row since the shutdown of the pandemic. The challenge as far as the Twin Dome was concerned was that the installation “in colour” of the previous summer was still in place and the fundamental theme was the effect of daylight coming into the space. The interior space with its multiple squares of colour, had a certain floating quality in its reaction with the daylight now streaming through the new window. To summarise this had been exhibition about daylight which I was proposing to re-open during Open Night – with the emphasis on night.
In one very basic sense, with all of the elements of the installation still in place, it seemed to me to be perfectly legitimate to simply run an experiment of “I wonder what this will look like with artificial lighting”. So that’s what happened.
With this as a starting point I suppose option one would be a massive lightbulb just outside the window (and then get someone to slowly move it from east to west over the course of the event). Quickly ruling that out, I then decided on using multiple lighting sources all at various locations and, bit by bit, a completely new version of “in colour” came into being. With the different elements (and their shadows) now revealing themselves in a space of white walls and wooden, domed ceiling, initial realisations were that the space seemed a bit smaller, that some elements seemed to disconnect themselves from others or that a special intensity might have accidentally fallen on otherwise minor parts.
All in all I thought of it as a good experiment – another bit of learning about light in the space – but I’m now looking forward to the summer again when I’ll be able to go back to using the great big lightbulb outside the window. That will be “Colour-field” and more on that next.