The Ecology of Light
Sunlight, Separation and Seeing
Light and I are old friends;
I remember being small, biking in the Midlands, asking the
ever-present clouds to part so my friend, Sun, could shine and
warm my numb hands.
I remember climbing Waitematā sandstone, clutching grass
that made my skin itch to see a glittering sea.
I wonder about the potential of light. It is the epitome of an intimate ecology.
Light touches and penetrates skin, illuminates that which is hiding. Literature is swamped with metaphors of light meaning potential. Light reveals, and I wonder about understanding light and its relations as a pathway to potential worlds of warmth, reciprocity and understanding.
It takes sunlight eight minutes to reach Earth, a planet more reliant on light than any in our solar system. Sunlight has been a necessity to the evolution of life on our planet for billions of years. A teenage sun provided the radiation necessary to develop the first complex organic molecules. These molecules evolved as the sun grew older and more stable, forming life as we know it today. Sunlight provided food via photosynthesis for the tree of life to grow branches uncountable and not entirely explored.
In the eighth minute, we are bathed in starlight that makes things grow taller.
Sunburst // oil on canvas
It is irresponsible to care for light without acknowledging the creation stories of this whenua and the light that blankets it. In Te Ao Māori, light and colour was brought on by the separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku, the creation story that I grew up with. Rangi and Papa were in a tight embrace with their children between them when they were pushed apart. Between these great celestial beings came Te Ao Mārama, the world of light we know today.
I think about this light marking a great divide, and how these marks reflect back into my work. The light in my paintings has become radiant. Building this radiance offers me precious time to reflect on what should be seen. In this, painting has become a contemplative practice of slowness, care and consideration. Understanding light is not an easy task; revealing shadows can often lead to seeing what eyes of the past reflect back at you.
Not all was easy when Rangi and Papa were separated,
a world of light takes the eyes time to adjust to.
separating (touching) // oil on board
Pythagoras, Euclid and Hipparchus thought that our eyes excreted some sort of substance that “felt” objects, thus illuminating them to us. Epicurus awarded objects more agency in thinking that they project their own kind of light towards us. Plato proposed the extramission theory; that between our eyes and what we are seeing, there exists some kind of visual fire. This fire mixes with day/ambient light to form homogenous vision. While disproven by optical science, I think there is a responsibility in the poetics of caring for this visual fire. How does one ensure the hearth is open to all offerings? How do we ensure that the mixing of fire and daylight is one of considered, open collaboration.
When the sun rises over Matairangi near where I live, my eyes can cast their gaze further and consider more. The light touches objects, which absorb certain wavelengths of light and disseminate others. Thus, light is a necessity to colour; it is no wonder that Impressionism was so closely followed by Fauvism - to intimately know light is to understand colour as its simultaneously-occuring lover. The nature of light is to illuminate and when something is truly seen it is often liberated - the act of making the unseen seen. In order to cater to its needs, a being must first be seen.
When light is interrupted by an opaque object, it casts its shadow upon the surface away from the light source. This shadow is formed by the traced absence of light, which illuminates (or deluminates) the shape. Aurora Levins Morales comments on tracing absences “... tracing absences can balance a picture, even when you are unable to fill in the blanks.” (Levins-Morales, 27). Understanding this quality of light as a framework for seeing what is absent allows us to find solutions to see that which has been destroyed or ignored.
if outside your window you hear the river
run
meet the current that has always held you
// oil on canvas
Colonisation has led to the hiding, non-sacred burial and destruction of many more-than-human beings. Te Whanganui-a-Tara was once a place of great water. With the arrival of European colonisers, several life-giving streams were buried and darkened by development of the city and the settler-view of the streams as ‘unproductive’. 95.5% of all waterways have been buried underground. These streams have only recently been awakened in the minds of residents; Wellington City Council commissioned artists to make murals and street engravings along the pathways of the awa. Increasingly, urban designers, ecologists, artists and creative practitioners have nursed the idea of ‘daylighting’.
Daylighting
noun
/ˈdeɪ.laɪ.tɪŋ
(the process of making something, especially a stream, open to the air and light again after it has been covered over by land, buildings, etc.:)
In studying daylighting, I have often been drawn to the similarities between the buried streams and Queer people. Both have identity and visibility explicitly tied to each other, with the space to exist as ‘naturally occurring’ compromised by systematic and structural binaries made for speed, efficiency and individual gain. Daylighting, coming out, revealing, and acknowledging are all processes of visibility - one is not visible in the dark.
One of the most interesting qualities of light is its ability to move in a vacuum, a void. Light waves travel in spaces devoid of object, substance and substrate, unlike sound waves which are mechanical and require a medium to move through. It is through this quality that light has the ability to make visible spaces of potential. Here I am thinking of Chora and Te Kore. Chora, described by Plato as “the transition between form and reality”, is a maternal, third-space that dysregulates hierarchy and order. Te Kore is the first space named in the creation of Te Ao Mārama, and appears as a space of chaos, abundance and unlimited potential. These two non-places are undefinable, borderless and holding. They are not a darkness to be feared, but a place to be nurtured within.
If light can not only travel but thrive in a vacuum of potential, then one could argue this is its habitat. It is in that which are considered voids, spaces without names, profoundly Queer spaces, where light and its offspring, joy, nurse and grow. By understanding the ecology of light, we can trace the impact of light-focused, joy-based, people-centered frameworks for community as both the antithesis and healer of extractive, destructive ways of being.
To understand a place, one must first develop a way of seeing.
tino ātaahua e hoa!