Perth, Australia-born artist James Tapscott creates beautiful and otherworldly outdoor installations using various types of light. For the image immediately above and below, he used fiber optic cable to shine lights on various fields, filling a large space of approximately 70ft x 70xft. Called Transference, it leaves the viewer with that strange and uneasy feeling that we aren’t alone in this world.
Similarly, in The Arc series, the last two photos in this post, the artist uses a 100m long arc of rope light to cut across the surface of a salt lake. Left for nearly a month, the installation kept changing as the lake’s tidal energy helped it to create new forms. Slowly, the rope became encrusted with salt, making it appear as if it was a natural part of the landscape itself.
As he says, “The forms I create are usually quite simple and elegant – without baggage. I strive to enable the viewer to experience the work in a state of nameless non-objectification, if only for the briefest of moments. This primal interaction empowers one to transcend language and embrace the potential to remove all boundaries between self and subject, matter and energy, light, time, information… hopefully to see a little more today than they did yesterday.
“While being energy efficient and environmentally sensitive my works with their temporal, ephemeral nature strive to remind us of the same traits that our world subtly communicates to us, through the changing of the seasons and through shifts in climate and topography, that our world exists in time as much as space.”
Notice how Tapscott’s artworks take on completely different moods during the day (or dusk) than at night.
