Marianne Lind

The poetical power of light

Is it possible to take photographs of streaming water, where there is no water, the sunset over the sea where there is no sea? Where the things we see, or think we see, are actually created by our own fantasy.

A photograph is a copy of the reality and is created when light catches on a light-sensitive medium in a camera. But the reality is ever changing and is a subjective construction. We live alongside each other, but the little bubble of reality around us is like fragments in a kaleidoscope. We constantly get cheated in our attempts to interpret the reality and our one visual stimuli.

Streams of light

Light is an electromagnetic radiation that is created when electrons are accelerating. White light exists within all the colours in the rainbow with different wavelengths. The sun as the source of radiation creates a continuous spectrum. When a flash of light hits a prism it will change its direction. The various colors refract differently and create a fantastic spectra of colours.

A common phrase in Swedish ”to look too deeply into the glass” means to get intoxicated. That is how I would describe the way I felt when I first discovered the fantastic properties of glass. There, at the outer edge of our field of vision, are immense riches and continual change, a marvelous micro-world appearing as light passes through glass objects.

In this fascinating borderland of refracting phenomena I have caught the poetic power of light where the details that are difficult to see with the naked eye appear all the more distinctly through the eye of the camera.

By using the ever changing quality of light, the structure of the glass medium and the surroundings, I have been able to create a series of unique photographs of light refractions in glass. My pictures are a personal interpretation of a fugacious reality. 

Some of these pictures were shown in Sweden at Steninge World Exhibition of Art Glass 2005, as well as at the big fair for Classic Contemporary and Modern Art, ART LONDON Chelsea 2006, Plateaux Gallery, Central London 2006,  SEAFAIR, ART GREENWICH, Connecticut, USA 2011 and at Stockholm Concert Hall 2012.

The photographs have been sold in Sweden, Norway, USA and United Kingdom. They have been likened to the mystic works of John Bauer, August Strindbergs dramatic arcipelagoes and the light in William Turners paintings.

Landscapes

A gloomy winter day a few years ago,  I stumbled straight into a wall,  an ugly timber wall painted with graffiti. With the sea and nature as my major source of inspiration this wall became the start of a new series of images called Landscapes. 

What aroused my curiosity and led me to look closer and study the wall was the crackled paint that formed patterns in wonderful designs. On one side of the wall someone has written with barely legible capital letters "MANY YEARS AGO I TOOK THE INNOCENCE OF THIS WALL". It is not easy to understand what the writer meant, but  I would rather describe it as I tried to "capture its soul" when I pointed the camera towards the wall.