JUST LIGHT

“With colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”
Henri Matisse*

In my photographic series, Nothing to see here (2019), I began experimenting with light by projecting film onto a curtain, using the drapery as both background and foreground, subject and object in the photographs. This series was as much about the curtain and its role in art and cinema as it was about light and colour.

In this new series Just Light I have focused on the elemental qualities of photography – light, colour and shadow. Luminosity in images suggests the infinite and for Byzantine and Classical spectators, the foremost aspect of colour to be appreciated was its value as light. Colour and light are suggestive and sensual, they stir emotions and associations, making the perception of both subjective and irrational, something whose effect cannot be grasped intellectually. The abstract painting of classical modernism viewed colour as a specific means of expressing the sublime. Colourfield Painting liberated the canvas from all external influences employed to determine content and formal characteristics.

Photography on the other hand, while founded in light and utilising colour printing since 1866, has for the most part remained coupled to the reproduction of the real– a depiction of a person, object, event. In the series Just Light I have used analogue photographic processes, such as negative reversal, dodging / burning and layering colour materials of different density to elevate light and colour to content in their own right. These techniques also introduce the element of chance, as you cannot predict exactly how they will impact the work. The photographs do not attempt to capture reality or personal experience, but instead evoke a response in the viewer: a mood, an emotion.

"To sense the soul, without explanation, without words, and to depict this sensation- this, I believe, is what led me to monochrome painting."
Yves Klein*

Colour automatically presses forward towards form. To create an organizing structure within which I could experiment and which would give coherence across the work I employed geometric shapes –circles, squares, and rectangles to contain and mask the light. The simplicity of these geometric shapes combined with the brilliance of light and colour creates luminous photographs. The presence of black in the photographs disrupts their two-dimensional quality and creates an illusion of perspective and depth, not just an absence of colour, but negative space that is woven into the material existence of the photograph itself.

Robyn Stacey
February 2022

*Kelvin colour today, eds. Robert Klanten, Boris Brumnjak, Sven Ehmann, Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin, 2007.
*Unimaginable. The State of Colour in Art, Farben Catalogue, Kerber Verlag, Leipzig, 2007

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

Drift.

As your eyes settle on the shadow, as they dilate, you begin to slip. There are no hard edges here. No anchors. Only diffusions. Slow expansions.

For a time, people debated whether the ancient Greeks perceived colour in the same way as we do now. Did they see blue? What was a wine-dark sea anyway? But it wasn’t about the red. They were talking about shimmer and flare of light on a shifting surface—the moving, shining spectacle of it all. Holding up a sloshing cup of wine became a hero’s journey through a raging sea. An image. A phrase. An artefact, of a kind, of a culture with different visual priorities and emphasis. Even then, when vision is understood in both cultural and biological terms, you are no closer, not really, to the question you started out with: Do we see the same things?

No, says Robyn Stacey about her new photographs. They’re not of anything. They’re just light. A sly title, when there is nothing more wondrous than light, and nothing more strange. From slot experiments and wave-particle duality, to the apricity of the winter sun warming the skin. None of us understand it, not if we’re honest, but we feel it.

We often talk about being drawn into artworks, using the language of bodies and movement. Stacey’s new light photographs suggest a physical space but nothing quite coalesces. There are shadows and gradations, but they’re not negatives as we might expect. There are, as she says, no objects. Instead, there is just the illusion of perspective and depth. These are vivid and luminous works. They offer a meditative space but it is not one that you enter, not with gravity intact. They often feel more like slipping. Like falling into light.

For some years, Stacey built camera obscuras in hotel rooms and artist’s studios—darkening the windows and letting the world in through a pinprick. They were ephemeral works. As the sun rose and fell outside, a reversed and inverted image appeared inside, and then passed away. At the time, Stacey described these camera obscuras as “in-between spaces” that were in the world but removed from it. They were unsettling mirror worlds—places where the familiar had to be reevaluated.

Just light, projected through coloured gels and simple perspex shapes. Light and colour and shadow—the tools of photography. Stacey’s process is analog. Each composition has been arrived at through an intuitive process of adjustment, sometimes over many days. This is similar to her earlier, highly-staged still life photographs of objects from historical collections, which also required moving in increments and responding to what is there. But these new works, she says, are largely irreproducible. Each one is contained. There’s obvious attention to balance and visual pleasure, but the intensity also comes from the way these works open space for association, memory and emotion. They are both otherworldly and allusive. The simple geometric shapes, used to both contain and mask the light, provide structure but some suggest planetary bodies. Others, thresholds. The colours are saturated. One work shifts from a yellow-toned green, bright as a new leaf in the sun, to the kind of tropical aqua found on postcards and paint chips. Just light? Perhaps. Stacey’s intent is not cool or detached. She wants to stir something. Instinctive responses. Feeling. A layering of experience, past and present.

Working inside her camera obscuras, watching the world come in as a ray of light, Stacey found herself thinking about light in elemental terms. In Nothing to see here, 2019, she projected film onto sheer, softly draped curtains. She was playing with ideas of concealment and revelation, and the history of the curtain in art and cinema, but the device also became a way for her to explore light and colour without relying on a traditional subject/object. In these works, the curtain was both foreground and background, intermediary and focus. It was another leap in what has been a wide-ranging, four-decade practice. “In a sense, I have just followed photography,” she said once. But it is also possible to see Stacey’s work as an ongoing exploration of perception—how it is shaped, and how that then influences our understanding of our world and ourselves.

Schopenhauer once said that we take the limits of our own field of vision for the limits of the world. Plato had his cave. Darkness has often been used to talk about the unknown and unknowable, but in Just Light it is afforded the same importance as light and colour. One work, The void is a visual place, 2021, centres on a receding, endless blackness, but most place light and dark in balance. The shadows are not voids or gaps, but points of connection—parts of a whole. They are works that insist that light, although it may be what we are first drawn to, cannot exist without darkness. As the poet Mary Oliver put it in The Uses of Sorrow: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

A spin. A clatter. Colours resolve into new formations. In some ways, Just Light offers the same pleasure, the chance to move through sensations and feelings. To enjoy colour. To see the world again in a new light. Or just, to see light.

Jane O'Sullivan
2021