Light- An introduction

When I found out that the theme for our second term at college was going to be light, I got pretty excited. See, I bloody love light. I love it's properties, it's mysticism and the fact that it is absolutely everywhere. Without light, we'd have nothing.

During the holidays I drew up this mind map all about light due to excitement for the project. Funnily enough, we were then tasked with making a mind map on our first day back, I just used the one I'd made already. Here it is:

My mind map of light

As you can see, there's a lot of things I relate to light in my head!
I can imagine that other people given this theme would approach it from their interests. Say I was interested in fashion, I would incorporate light into clothes. If I was interested in industrial design, I would make a lamp and so on.. but one of my biggest interests is light itself! A lot of my artwork I make already is about experimenting, understanding and interacting with light. I want to apply light to fashion, to film, photography, architecture, to everything! Light inspires a spectrum of ideas and artforms for me.

A photo I took a using a prism, bamboo mat & projector. I have noticed a common theme of ambient darkness in many 'light artists' work.

Light has so many different aspects that I'm interested in. I hope I will be able to isolate those aspects and discuss them individually so that I don't get lost in the hugeness of the theme. So let's delve into this mind map! The first thing that comes to my head when I think of light is Physics (If you know me, this shouldnt surprise you). To me, science is an art and art is a science- they're intrinsically linked.

Is Science and beauty linked?

Internal reflection and refraction of a diamond and a rain drop. This is what causes rainbows! 

The science of light is still too big a subject to be discussed in one blog post. So I'm going to divide it into these subjects: The Electromagnetic spectrum (X-rays n' stuff), Refraction (rainbows), Optics (eyes and lenses), Luminescence (Glowing things), Waves and particles (small things), Space (The moon, sun, stars and beyond), Colour (what a wonderful thing), Photography (capturing light) and Ideology (Life, Death, God, those things).
I might write some other bits, throw in some artist research and more work of my own. who knows? we'll see!

Sunset through an abandoned building in Birmingham.

Also, I have started up a Pinterest board dedicated to light. You can see that here.
Pinterest has proven rather useful as a digital scrap-book for me.