Lucent Lines is a site specific light installation created to make the most of the unique temporary exhibitions space at Newport. As well as two other works (hollow promise and line upon line) the exhibition will feature Curtain, a 9 metre wall of shifting light made from 448 electro-luminescent wire and 5000 plastic drinking straws.
The artist, whose medium is light, will completely transform the gallery space creating a unique visitor experience which is not to be missed.
Simon Fenoulhet’s work takes many forms, but there’s a common thread that runs though much of it. It’s the pursuit of this thread that takes his work in so many directions: He looks for magic in the simple, the ordinary, the practical-by-design. He could be using bricks, drawing pins, cocktail stirrers, teaspoons. He could find something familiar, like shoe laces, or new like electro-luminescent wire, as he does in this exhibition. In his hands they take on a new life; become something else. In the series of drawings shoelaces stand in for charcoal lines, their fuzzy edges mimic the roughly drawn line, turning what could be a straight geometrical exercise into something more poetic, as it becomes apparent that all is not as it first seems.
The wire curtain hangs like a veil. The coloured drinking straws threaded through the wire, gently distort the straight lines so, as the light pulses through the curtain, it echoes ripples on water or cloud movements. It’s transparent, so that people on the other side can be seen moving across its surface. The straws glow like neon, their colours sing as they light up and then fade. While the effect is simple and beautiful, behind the scenes there’s lots of complex technology at work. Simon worked with stage lighting engineers and used a video capture technique that reads pixel data from a moving image. So a slice through a video of clouds scudding or water rippling is read as little data switches that turn the wire on and off, creating the sense of movement. It’s simply magical and there’s no need to understand the complicated technology behind it to appreciate it.
Light has been significant in much of what Simon does. He’s brought a gallery-in-waiting to life by night; made a wall see-through; created a glowing universe of Laser-lit ping-pong balls and lit up a church. For his Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales Award, he looked for darkness in the potholes and caves of South Wales. Wriggling through tiny cracks with his camera, he found new ways to record the places where the sun never shines. (Emma Geliot)
The official opening for the exhibition is Saturday 30th January 2008 at 11a.m.
Simon will be conducting two gallery tour-and-talks of the exhibition on Saturday March 6th at 11.30 and Weds March 24th at 2pm the talks are free and all are welcome.
Newport Museum and Art Gallery is supported by Arts Council of Wales.
