Pinch Jars

My interactive light installations investigate how perception creates reality. 

Studio-made LEDs, repurposed glass, reflection, shadow, and lensing explore the surprise of worlds beyond what we usually see. The lenses of microscopy and astronomy show patterns and processes that, bound up with the inherent limitations of ways of seeing, come to be called reality.

I am interested in the analog aspects of light that were available prior to the Digital Age. Sir Isaac Newton founded light science from candles, sunlight, and crystal prisms, repositioning himself and his experiments as the sun moved throughout the day, to compose his seminal work, Opticks. 

My work brings an opportunity for slow observation of lights we see, but don’t notice, every day. There are no computers, no wifi, no software, no digital programming, no motors, and no projectors involved in my work. The movement of light in my work is analog, directly related to the real space, for example a lens sways because of air movement overhead. I fabricate my own light emitting diodes at the soldering table in order to control color and intensity. LEDs make light by interrupting a low voltage electrical circuit with a diode that glows as it hosts this interruption in the wire. It is not smart technology. When the light leaves the emitter, it goes to me, the human maker, to lens, colorize, and move, and not to a computer that is limited to the parameters of its manufacture. 

This is slow light, at the pace of the human.