Functional Lighting Sculpture?  Or just Plain Lighting?

Mastering the manipulation of light is a fundamental ambition of the visual artist and designer.  Even painting a wall in your home, which may seem on the surface as something minimally artistic, is in fact an exercise in manipulating light.  The color we place on anything is in essence a filter that blocks the other colors of the spectrum from reaching our eye.  Most artists create works that manipulate the light phenomena, whether it is done so consciously or not, in this manner; at the point of reflection.  Some, especially lighting designers, attempt to manipulate both the reflective surface as well as the source of light itself.  This approach is essential in my practice of creating functional works of light as stand alone lighting designs or as lighting installations.  With the source of light in one hand and a material or materials in another, I begin to combine the ingredients to achieve a desired or unpredicted effect.  Once (or if), the effect is pleasing, I then begin the process of engineering a structure that fuses them together.

This gallery is a small sample of several works built to explore the seemingly limitless techniques in manipulating light to enhance art and design.  And, because my practice employs a heavy cross-pollination of ideas and discovery, much of these designs sprung from experiments done while creating light sculptures.  Likewise, It is also safe to say that reverse is certainly true.