Questions:
- From your experience, do you think light has a healing capacity?
- How does light affect your mood and well being within your practice?
- Have you ever experimented with light to encourage healing?
- Are there any particular methods in your lighting processes to engage your viewers in a specific way? Do you think these could be incorporated into rooms within hospital environments?
- Do you think hospital patients (especially stroke survivors), could benefit from light therapy?
Answers:
- We have evolved as diurnal beings, light is essential for the processing of Vitamin D through our skin, and we have developed sense of sight to perceive and understand the world around us and function within it – aside from the practical aspects of this, there are wide-ranging implications for the effect this has on us psychologically and on our general well-being. So the short answer would be yes, however, as an artist I’m not particularly interested in the process of healing, I am interested in provoking a response, and I’m very aware that the quality of light, and it’s context within my own work, can affect the mood of the viewer, and provoke new thoughts and ideas.
The mood of the viewer can be a very subjective issue, at my last show some of the visitors commented on the relaxing and meditative quality in my work, which I found it a little perplexing as I’d actively built-in elements such as flashing lights and unpredictable changes in the sequence of programming LEDs to create a sense of unease. Other visitors had a very different experience, and seemed to be very stimulated by the work and commented on the use of expanded polystyrene packaging and discarded cardboard packaging, and how these “toxic” materials had been recycled/reappropriated to look so beautiful and draw attention to contemporary issues of pollution.
2. On a personal level one of the significant aspects of my work is about my own perennial issues with insomnia and its affect personal levels of stress and anxiety, and trying to express these to other people. In short, I spend a lot of time in a dark place, awake, trying to control repetitive thoughts and anxieties when normal people sleep, in my studio I spend a lot of time in the dark space trying to express, amongst other issues, how this feels. Whenever I’m working with light, or expecting people to engage with my work in an exhibition, the first thing that I do is introduce them to a dark space. I’m very conscious that this puts them in a vulnerable and cautious state of mind, and that I can use this situation to control how they perceive my work. It’s not about light itself, but an extreme contrast between light and dark. On a personal level within my practice, the closest are probably get to any sense of healing is a cathartic one.
3. No.
4. As I mentioned in question two, the contrast between light and dark is integral to my work so the first method I use is to present my work in a controlled dark environment. To engage people visually I use light in ways that people are maybe not familiar with in normal situations, for example projecting light through expanded polystyrene packaging which shows its internal structures and spaces, as opposed to light projected onto an object from an external source which shows us its form. I also use the spatial relationships between LED lights, apertures and edges of discardable packaging materials like cardboard boxes, and surfaces onto which I project animated patterns and sequences of coloured light. The conceptual link between the projected and modulated light, and the original purpose of the packaging ( i.e. flat screen TV packaging, or Covid Test Kit packaging) is also important to the content of the work and how people engage with it.
The quality of light is very important – how bright the light is, the colour of the light, and how quickly the quality of the light changes. The contrast in quality of light within a sculpture or installation is also significant. Brighter light and a greater intensity of saturation of colour tends to provoke a more energetic and dynamic response, this can be exaggerated by using extreme contrasts, like complimentary contrasting coloured lights in close association, in addition, if the changing quality of light is unpredictably timed or sequenced, this can also increase the unsettling effect and create a feeling of uncertainty, but remember, how a viewer responds to this is very subjective – one viewer might feel scared or upset, and a different viewer might find the same experience exhilarating and exciting. By contrast, changes in quality of light that are slow, predictable, and repetitive tend to be more relaxing or hypnotic and calming, although some viewers might describe this experience as plain boring. It goes without saying that as an artist, I will work with both both of these extremes, alternately and simultaneously, to provoke a response in the viewer.
So to answer your question it could be possible to incorporate the processes that I use to control light in the hospital environment, but it would have to be a dark space to control the light within, and the context would be very important.
5. I believe that it could be possible for hospital patients (Especially stroke survivors), to benefit from light therapy but this is a very subjective response, I have no scientific experience to justify this.
The term “light therapy” is a very general one, for example are you talking about a form of therapy that could treat the physiological effects of a stroke – for example enabling stroke survivors to develop new neurological connections, or are you suggesting that light therapy could enable victims to be use existing undamaged neurological connections through which to reroute or reprogram themselves to facilitate thought processes and previous neural pathways that were destroyed by the stroke? Or alternatively is the role of “light therapy” one of treating associated issues such as well-being, stress and anxiety, and quality of sleep, et cetera?
The quality of light and its colour can have a significant impact and a person. Dr Beau Lotto for example has demonstrated that placing people in cocoons of different coloured light can affect their perception of time. Colour can also have a significant affect peoples moods and Strobe lighting can simultaneously have opposite effects in people and can induce a hypnotic trance like state in one person, and an epileptic fit in the person standing next to them. We also have increasingly strong associations with coloured light through the coding of information, i.e. traffic lights, mobile devices, led lights on electrical devices, and colour can have very strong cultural associations.
To answer this question effectively I think you need to be a bit more specific about what “Light Therapy” is, and what it is being used to treat. I think it would also be helpful to talk to Scientists, Researchers or qualified Health Practitioners and Therapists who have a more objective experience of how light, colour, and the change in quality of these in a controlled environment can affect a patient. The only artist that I can think of who has a background close to this is James Turrell, who studied experimental psychology before developing his career as an artist using light.
Analysis:
In response to my questions, this interview was very detailed compared to other responses, which also fine tuned my line of research. This artist, although they do not have direct experience working with light within a healing context, have definitely witnessed the effect of light and its healing properties from their responses to gallery exhibits. Viewers coming to their show have experienced calming and relaxing interactions with light. In their work, they have realized the impact of a dark room on the emotive sensation of viewers. This opens up the question as to whether light therapy could for stroke survivors have more beneficial impact within dark spaces? Other artists who have also done this method is Yayoi Kusama and Teamlab.
The artist also provided direction into more detailed routes considering light therapy and more avenues for research. I believe this feedback was one of the most beneficial responses to my research, as it proved that although the intentions of the artist were not to heal, light has the power to induce this effect on human beings regardless of even the artist’s initial intentions in their practice.
Evidence: