New Pier Arts Centre exhibitions focus on light

Two new exhibitions open at the Pier Arts Centre today, Saturday, with light as the overarching theme to both.

light wave – luminance and line in the Pier Arts Centre Collection marks the International Year of Light and features art works from the Pier Arts Centre’s collection that celebrate light, form and colour. The exhibition focuses on artists who use light to illuminate, cast shadows or emphasise colour or who have developed other surprising ways to utilise or define light.

Artists in the exhibition include Roger Ackling, who directs the power of the sun through a hand held magnifying glass, burning dark lines onto found wooden objects; Garry Fabian Miller who carefully controls light entering his studio to create phenomenological photographs using glass vessels, coloured inks and light sensitive paper and Adam Barker-Mill whose single coloured structures modulate light to express the subtlety of tone under differing lights.

The exhibition also includes poems and films by Orcadian film maker Margaret Tait alongside selected poetry by George Mackay Brown and Ian Hamilton Finlay that consider light in scientific, spiritual and aesthetic terms.

Showing concurrently is Out of my Own Light, a selection of photographs and artefacts by Orcadian artist and musician Louise Bichan, documenting a journey through Canada, in the footsteps of her grandmother, Margaret Sarah Tait.

The artist commented: “I’m certain that my passion for photography was passed on to me by my grandmother, Margaret, who documented almost every event throughout her life and meticulously arranged and catalogued the photographs in albums with captions and dates. We also shared an interest in music; she was a talented singer, well known for her beautiful soprano voice. I hope, through this project, to be able to do her story justice.”

Both exhibitions run until May 24.