Catching the light

Photography lecturer Dr Sam Vale and curator Hazel Stone have curated a literally enlightening exhibition at the Sidney Cooper Gallery. Catching the Light explores artists’ fascination with light, how it is used as a material to preserve the essence of place, time and experience, evoking feelings such as nostalgia, wonder and otherness. This exhibition sets to survey light as a medium in the practice of ten contemporary artists, employing a range of media from video based work, to pinhole photography, sculpture and camera obscura. The works in the exhibition have been developed as practice-based research into the different attributes of light, examining diverse themes and ideas. The exhibition features Michaela French’s Collection from the Museum of Light, which is a series of artworks that 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. In dialogue with these works are Emma Weislander’s work Black Mirror, Nigel Breadman’s Pinhole Photography, Sophy Rickett’s photographic series Observations, Melanie King’s Hubble Polaroids and artists Marja Pirila and Petri Nuutinen’s Camera Obscura Buckets.