Forging a Link 2019
Curated by Cappy Counard for the Mercer Museum, Doylestown, PA
Work was inspired by the museum's collection of pre-industrial tools.
Intrigued by the Mercer Museum’s classification of lighting as a tool, I came to think of light as the tool that rules them all: without artificial light a lot of the other activities requiring the use of tools would not be possible- imagine the watchmaker operating in the dim light of a rainy day.
In my installation I try to pay homage to those early lighting tools with the use of 21st century technology. 3D scans of an oil lamp, a candleholder, and a Betty lamp were laser cut into thin square sheets of acrylic in the scale of a smartphone Instagram feed. Stacked up in brackets like old-fashioned slides and backlit with LED lights faint shadows of their full form is revealed.
The positive forms of the scans were manipulated using a CAD modeling program and reconstituted by hand using silver fabrication. The resulting lamps are pure abstracted form without function; and as such they serve as objects, defunct, just like the tools on display in the museum.
One of the earliest forms of lighting were candles. Watching a candle burn and slowly disappear is mesmerizing; being under its spell is like stepping out of time. The third part of my installation shows a candle arrested at different stages of burning down, cast in a clear urethane resin. Variations on time passing. Or: In between instances. Moments captured.
The passing of time- the most intense sensation I felt when first visiting the Mercer Museum.