lights through paradox

Kiln formed glass fragments, steel cabling, projector. 2020-1 and 2023
Varying dimensions

A light-mobile composed of kiln-formed glass fragments that are suspended using parametric modelling to create a convex lens-form that interfaces light. Referencing the origin of lens-based technologies, the piece utilises glass remnants from the glassblowers kiln. These fluxing fragments of glass create a lens form that never resolves into solidity - instead of focusing the gaze towards fixity, it scatters light into a field of vision, playing on the double nature of technological light that both informs and disorientates.

The present is a time of disorientation. When we turn our lens to the contemporary, we are confronted by a scattering of light. This fragmentation veils the future in a cloak of unknowability. But ‘how can we live without the unknown in front of us?’ - René Char tells us that the poem ‘rises from its well of mud and of stars’ to ‘bear witness, almost silently, that it contained nothing which did not truly exist elsewhere, in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions’ (René Char, Argument). The psychologist and philosopher Erich Neuman claims that the act of becoming conscious consists not in the resolution of any fixity, but in an unknown, around which our symbols circumscribe.

Gazing at this fractured lens—through the paradoxical play between orientation and disorientation; form and fragmentation—we hope to invoke a meditation on our place in the universe at the opening of the paradox, ‘in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions’, such that we might embrace the unknown in front of us.