Collection from the Museum of Light is a series of artworks which reference a cabinet of curiosity and museum archive. The artwork seeks to preserve the essence of place, time and experience through precisely recorded light samples. It creates a visually poetic space which reflects the ephemeral nature of the human experience of light, as well as our desire to capture and catalogue our experience through the mediated image.
Light is constant, fundamental and panoptic, but we experience it as changeable and evocative of specific temporal locations. Our perception of the quality of light in an environment significantly influences our experience and recollection of that place. The subtleties of luminosity, intensity and colour have the capacity to trigger memory and evoke nostalgia by eliciting a sense of the familiar or a yearning for another time and place. Our experience of light is bound with our sense of personal and cultural identity, our notions of belonging and our romantic dreams of the unknown. Our perception of light reflects and influences our experience of being in the world.
In A Collection from the Museum of Light the archive itself becomes an object of nostalgia as it preserves the dialogue between light, time and place. The viewer enters this dialogue with his or her own yearnings for preservation and place, generating new connections and memories whilst drawing on existing individual and cultural experiences.