Cambridge 7th to 9th September
Presenting Author:
Gillian Hobson
<gillhobson@me.com>
article posted 15 Apr 2015
Gillian Hobson
Gillian Hobson is an artist and researcher working across a range of different contexts
and media. Her extensive work with glass in architectural and sculptural contexts has
informed an ongoing exploration of light, space and subjectivity. An advocate of arts in
health and wellbeing, works may be seen as enquiries surrounding the affective potentials
of light in spatial experience, drawing attention to the physical and psychological
dimensions of encounter. Recent activities include showings and events in Germany,
Switzerland and Ireland, and she is Creative Director of The Lightlines Project, which
explores the intersections of digital media and installation-based art practices surrounding
subjectivity and place. Gillian is the author of the publication "Recovery" commissioned
by RDaSH NHS Foundation Trust, exploring creative strategies for recovering from
enduring mental health problems, the series "The Light Archive", mapping light in
quotidian space through image, "Lightlines", an exploration of place and self, and
contributing author of "Interactive Experience in the Digital Age: Evaluating new
Art Practice".
Gillian Hobson
Doctoral Researcher in Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
This paper, based in practice, addresses the interplay between glass and digital technologies and how this may be explored and employed in art-making, addressing the relation of glass and light as mutually activating elements. Introducing digital moving-image and projection to static glass arrangements, I draw attention to the particular qualities of glass as a reflective and refractive medium and the ways in which these qualities may be employed to extend light effects in spatial contexts beyond the object to produce dynamic vistas of colour and light.
Informed by an extensive study of the travel of natural light in space and the ephemerality of light patterns and effects, explorations acknowledge the conscious and unconscious dimensions of encounter with light, extending to artistic forms which harness and explore ideas of light and its affects in encounters with art-works. Influenced by psychogeographic and psychoanalytic perspectives I examine how the interplay of static glass planes and digital light projections animate spatial and psychological experience, disrupting associations between the material and the immaterial, the inner and outer worlds of the viewer.
Using examples of practice based activity, I illustrate the ways in which forms and approaches facilitate a dynamic and gestural space, positing engagement with such works as sites of inter- and intra-subjective potential.
I consider how such approaches activate memory and imagination, and the potential of digital and material interplays in artistic production.
