Heike Brachlow 2008

Table of Contents

ON COLOUR, GLASS AND LIGHT 1

Transmitted Light and Coloured Shadows 4

Colour membranes – transparent, translucent and opaque 7
Illusions in Optical glass 9
Volume Colour 11
An Illusion of Volume Colour 15
Clear or White? 16
An Absence of Colour 17
The Translucency of Pâte de verre 18
Opalescent glass 19
Conclusion: Colour, Glass and Light 20
Bibliography 21

On Colour, Glass and Light

‘It’s obvious that colour as material and colour as light are extremely
different. Colour almost always seems applied, except for raw materials
and they’re seldom bright’, observes minimalist artist Donald Judd, about
an exhibition by Dan Flavin1.

Glass could be seen as a material that allows colour to take form, a

material that merges colour, form and light.

However, discussion of colour is difficult, colour vocabulary scarce and not

always understood. Even the most basic terms are interpreted
subjectively. In Part I of his Interaction of Color, Joseph Albers begins: “If

1
Judd, Donald. Complete writings. P.200.

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one says "Red" (the name of a colour) and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can
be sure that all these reds will be very different.”2
Clearly, even a simple discussion of colour poses difficulties; how, then,
does one discuss colour in glass, with its many different modes of
appearance and its many contributing factors?

Here is Judd’s idea of a discussion of colour:

‘After a few decades the discussion of colour is so unknown that it would
have to begin with a spot. How large is it? Is it on a flat surface? How
large is that? What colour is that? What colour is the spot? Red. If a
second spot is placed on the surface, what colour is it? Black? What if both
spots were red, or black? How far away is the black spot from the red
spot? Enough for these to be two discrete spots, one red and one black?
Or near enough for there to be a pair of spots, red and black? Or apart
enough for this to be uncertain? What if the red and black spots are next
to each other? And of course, which red?’3

A discussion on colour in glass would have to begin with a simple three-

dimensional form, for example a cuboid. How large is it? Is it transparent
or opaque? Are there variations in thickness? What about the surface? Is
it textured? Polished? Matt? What colour is it? Where does the illumination
come from? How strong is it? What type is it? How does the colour change
when the type of illumination changes? What happens if the direction of
illumination changes?

Presumably, Albers’ and Judd’s reds are opaque; the colour of a surface,
which is the appearance of colour discussed in the majority of literature.
Other types of colour – transparent colours - are, if at all, mentioned

2
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006
(1936), p. 3.
3
Judd, Donald. Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular.
ArtForum, Summer 1994

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

briefly, with differing definitions. For articulation of modes of appearance

of colour, psychology, physiology (studies in perception) and physics offer
some possibilities; although artists empirically engage with colour, they do
not often articulate their findings.

One of the biggest differences between glass and most other materials is
its transparency. And if a solid lump of this transparent medium is
coloured, and the colour is transparent as well, this colour appears very
different to opaque or surface colour. This transparent coloured material
could be a thin layer, containing empty volume, like in a blown vessel. It
could be clear glass with a film of colour. This film could be partly opaque,
obscuring the view to the inside, or thinning out and merging into clear,
revealing glimpses of the interior, like in many of Dale Chihuly’s
sculptures.

How can these different modes of colour be described? Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe called the appearance of a volume of transparent colour
‘dioptric’4, but this expression did not catch on. The two most common
terms used for transparent colour that is not surface colour are volume
colour and film colour. Albers explains volume colour using the example of
a coloured liquid: Tea in a spoon will appear lighter than tea in a cup; the
blue of a swimming pool will appear darker in deeper water. Katz
describes volume colour as “colours which are seen as organized in and
filling a tri-dimensional space”5, and for him, the true property of volume
colour is expressed only when these colours are genuinely transparent.

Film colour, according to Albers, appears as a thin, transparent,

translucent layer between the eye and an object. Gestalt psychologist
David Katz describes it as the colour experience one gets when looking
through “a piece of smoked glass of medium transparency or a piece of

4
Goethe, Johann W. Theory of Colours. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970 (1840).
5
Katz, David, The World of Colour. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1935,
p.21

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

coloured gelatine, held at arm’s length in such a way that its boundaries
are visible.”6 A Dictionary of Psychology defines it as “a misty appearance
of colour without any fixed distance that is experienced when there are no
lines or edges present in the visual field.”7

I understand film colour as the colour of light or air, an appearance of

colour without a definite location or boundaries. Volume colour is the
colour of a transparent or translucent solid or liquid that is coloured
throughout its mass – like the homogenous colour of a solid mass of
transparent glass. For the purpose of discussing glass, I will use the term
‘colour film’ to describe a thin transparent coloured layer. If this layer
encompasses an empty volume, it could be called a membrane, while a
thin transparent coloured layer covering a mass is a skin.

The other major considerations in the discussion of colour and glass are
surface quality and form – the surface can be matt or glossy, textured or
smooth; each of these properties will impact differently on the way light is
transmitted, reflected, refracted, diffused, and scattered. Form, of course,
has a considerable impact on the appearance of colour – and the other
way round. The relationship of colour and perceived size is demonstrated
by Lois Swirnoff in her book Dimensional Color. Shown are examples of
objects appearing larger or smaller, closer or further away than they
really are depending on their colour.8

Transmitted Light and Coloured Shadows

When thinking of colour, light, and glass, stained glass comes to mind.
The practice of modifying light in great buildings is very old: from thin
alabaster slabs in ancient Egypt to horn and oiled linen in the middle ages,

6
Katz, p.17
7
Coleman, A. M. A Dictionary of Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2001.
8
Swirnoff, Lois. Dimensional Color. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003 (1989), p. 52-53

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window coverings were used to mute the bright sunlight and modify the
atmosphere inside. There is some evidence of stained glass having been
used for windows as early as in Byzantine times. Certainly, by the Middle
Ages, stained glass was a well-developed art, used especially in buildings
that needed an atmosphere of reverence: Christian churches. Colour
became important for its symbolic as well as decorative and light-
transforming properties, as stained glass church windows were used
widely to disseminate the scriptures to the masses. The interior of
churches was transformed by light, coloured shadows logging the passage
of the day, the path of the sun, changes in the weather, the passing of
seasons, forever changing.

From a perceptual point of view, stained glass windows are, at least

during the day, always seen in transmitted light – the light passes through
rather than reflects off. Therefore the glass always appears luminous;
more or less so, depending on the strength of the light outside. The
transparent colour is a thin layer, usually on a flat plane – a coloured
membrane, separated by black lead lines. No matter what colour the lead
actually is, it will always appear black with the light transmitting through
the adjacent glass. Depending on the strength of colour, or colour density,
the background can influence the appearance of colour; trees obscuring
the sun can block part of the light, or alter the colour by providing a
darker background. Movement can be perceived through the glass, for
example passing birds. At night, the stained glass window recedes,
becomes almost obscure from inside the building: without transmitted
light, all its power disappears. Instead, if the inside of the building is
illuminated, the beckoning colours can be seen from the outside.

In an exhibition in the National Gallery, Art of Light: German Renaissance

Stained Glass (7 November 2007 - 17 February 2008), German
Renaissance stained glass windows were juxtaposed with paintings of the
same period. The contrast is that of a neon sign with a faded poster: The
quality of colour in the glass windows, in transmitted light, is so much
more intense than that of the painting in reflected light. One reason for

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this phenomenon is the contrast effect, which causes bright colours to

appear brighter when juxtaposed with pale colours, which then appear
more subdued. Another reason is the difference in quality of colour: the
colours of transparent glass in transmitted light advance in space
(sometimes made visible through coloured shadows), while the colours of
the paintings in reflected light seem to recede.

Today, although church communities continue to commission stained

glass, increasingly architectural glass is made for secular buildings like
shopping centres, train
stations and corporate
buildings. Coloured glass is
not only used for windows but
also for additional
illumination, as in a recent
work of Udo Zembok in the
Crypt of Chartres Cathedral.
The concept of stained glass
windows is used for the dual
purposes of art and lighting:
In the Crypt, a ‘light wall’, a
monumental coloured glass
wall, gently illuminates its
Udo Zembok, mur de lumière, 2006
surroundings, its turquoise
colour reminiscent of the water of baptism. Through its unchanging
nature, artificial illumination completely changes the character of the
glass: the colour, which in stained glass windows is expected to change,
remains constant.

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

Colour membranes – transparent, translucent and opaque

Glass art comes from a longstanding tradition of vessel making. Initially

small, opaque and core-formed, by the 5th century BC, techniques of
casting and cutting were employed to make larger, more sophisticated
vessels. Due to time-consuming manufacturing techniques, glass objects
remained luxury articles until the first century BC, when glassworks were
established in Rome and at other Italian sites. From then on, vessels
became more varied in form and function, more affordable and often
brightly coloured. At this time the main technique was casting. This was
slowly supplanted by glass blowing in the first century AD. The speed and
ease of production that could be achieved by employing the latter
technique allowed glassware to become ubiquitous as functional items,
aided by the invention of mould-blowing around AD 25.

To blow glass, a hollow metal rod is dipped into a crucible of molten glass
and rotated to pick up a quantity. The glass is shaped and then blown into
a parison, a small bubble. More can be gathered on top, then the glass is
blown and shaped into a desired form. This technique lends itself to the
manufacture of vessels. Until the middle of the 19th century, even window
glass and stained glass started as a vessel shape: blown spheres were
spun out, using centrifugal force, to create a flat plate called bullion,
which was then cut to size.

Taking into account this history, the emphasis on functionality in glass

manufacture, and the fact that many studio glass artists came from a
background in ceramics, where the container is a core shape, it is not
surprising that from the beginning, the vessel form was universally
employed and explored in the studio glass movement.

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

Lino Tagliapietra

Artist and teacher Lino Tagliapietro is a master in traditional Venetian

techniques. His elegant vessels display intricate patterns, juxtapositions of
transparent and opaque glass and subtle surface treatment. Fine threads
of opaque colour suspended in space are reminiscent of Bridget Riley’s
paintings like Cataract 3 (1967); however, the Venetian filigree and
reticello techniques by far predate op art. Tagliapietra uses pattern and
colour to accentuate form and achieve optical effects, and frequently
employs traditional techniques of lathe-cutting to attain velvety textured
surfaces that diffuse the light.

Venetian glass has influenced many studio artists. The most noted student
of Venetian technique is Dale Chihuly, whose combination of American
style and Venetian techniques is very successful. With the help of a team
of master glassmakers, he produces brightly coloured organic shapes,
which are often assembled into large installations. A gifted colourist, he
employs a bright, contrasting palette. From using glass vessels as a
canvas for figurative drawings in the collaborative work Irish Cylinders in
1975, Chihuly has always taken a painterly approach to glass. The
drawings became looser and less figurative, and colour became more
important with the Navaho Blanket series in the late seventies. Then came
the Maccia series, where Chihuly attempted to use all 300 colours in his

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hot shop9. A thorough exploration of colour ensued, each piece as an

experiment: One colour for the inside, another for the outside, and a
contrasting band of colour around the lip, along with several other colours
as accents.

The pieces are thin-walled and often there is a different colour on the
inside than out, which necessitates at least one opaque colour, or white in
between. Even though opaque, light still shines through and often the
inside colour can be glimpsed through the outside layer.
Chihuly’s colours are a mixture of opaque and transparent surface colours.
An opaque layer is usually viewed in reflected light. However, his vessels
are thin-walled and have no opaque mass behind their surface colours,
but an empty volume. Light can still shine through and the colour appears
translucent in transmitted light, but opaque in reflected light. If there are
two layers of opaque colour, its appearance can change completely
between transmitted and reflected light: A vessel with blue on the inside,
yellow on the outside would appear yellow and blue in reflected light, but
green in transmitted light. Sometimes, an opaque surface thins out into a
transparent membrane, or a surface carries both opaque and transparent
colours. Here, some or all of the outside colours and patterns are visible
on the inside, often filtered through the translucent interior. Or, in his
almost monochrome Basket Set series, opaque gradually becomes
translucent towards the base of the large outer vessel, allowing a partly
obscured view of the objects nested inside through the outer membrane.

Illusions in Optical glass

In the 1660s, Isaac Newton discovered that a prism, traditionally made of

clear glass, could split light into a spectrum of colours when struck by a
narrow beam of sunlight. The reason for this is different degrees of

9
Kuspit, Donald. Chihuly. Seattle: Portland Press, 1998, p. 100

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

refraction10 for different wavelengths, synonymous for colours, of light 11.

Although clear is generally thought to be the ‘natural’ appearance of glass,

this is not actually true. Clear glass is more difficult to achieve than many
coloured glasses, as sand, which makes up the bulk of the glassmaking
raw material, always contains impurities, usually in form of iron oxide,
which lends a greenish/ brownish tint. To counteract this, other oxides, for
example manganese or cerium oxide, are added as decolourisers. One of
the major goals of 15th – 19th century glassmakers was to achieve a
perfectly clear glass, which had to be completely colourless and bubble-
free: Optical glass. The quest continues, and in companies like Steuben,
every block of lead crystal is examined separately for bubbles before
being worked.

Glass artists extensively use the optical properties of glass; American

John Kuhn’s glass objects make use of mirror effects, refraction,
reflection, and lens effects. They are cut, polished and assembled from
many precisely cut pieces of mostly clear glass, revealing an infinity of
shapes and colours. The optical properties of the glass, together with
light, result in constant movement and change.

Colin Reid polishes the surfaces of his monumental works for reasons of
transparency, to create windows to the interior of the work, and to effect
illusions caused by refraction. As one walks around the work, surfaces
change from transparent to mirror-like, while at certain angles, the
textured motif appears larger, at others smaller.

Due to the Bohemian tradition of glass cutting and polishing in the Czech
Republic, many glass artists work with the properties of polished glass,
often in a subtle and ambiguous way, as demonstrated by Vaclav Cigler’s
sculptures in the Corning Museum of Glass. Optical sculptures are not

10
the amount a beam of light is bends on entering a different medium
11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton (accessed 12/02/08)

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

necessarily clear: they can be any colour, as Pavel Trnka amply

demonstrates in his prism-like coloured wedges, which clearly show
properties of volume colour: a wide, intensely coloured block tapers into a
clear thin edge, to nothingness. Sitting next to, or partly behind, another
wedge, of another colour, they reflect, refract, and confuse. No luminous
glow here, only reflections, sharp edges and bent light, mirroring, illusion.
Trnka’s focus is on colour in space in a phenomenological way, playing
with optical illusions as well as volume colour. His work illustrates the
relationship between volume and colour in a transparent object.

Volume Colour

In his essay “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in
Particular”, minimalist artist Donald Judd observes that “Colour to
continue had to occur in space”, and proceeded to explore colour with an
almost mathematical precision in his 3-dimensional work. Glass artists
have the medium to take the concept one step further: What better way
for colour to ‘occur in space’ than in a transparent solid?

Coloured solid pieces of glass are mostly cast. One of the earliest known
examples is a small portrait of an Egyptian King from 1450-1400 BC,
which is in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass. It is made from
blue glass, but due to long burial now coated with a tan substance, which
makes it appear opaque.

Transparent volume colour can be observed in cast monochrome cups,

bowls and vases from Assyria, dating between 725 – 600 BC. A well
known example is the Sargon Vase in the British Museum. Here, the
surface is matt and there are variations from thick to thin, with obvious
colour changes.

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

The Sargon Vase. Neo-Assyrian, 8th century BC

Volume colour made another appearance in the first century AD, with
Roman monochrome cast vessels. These are similar to Hellenistic ribbed
bowls from the fifth century BC, but employ colour, where their
predecessors were clear. Mostly blue or purple, they show a thick-thin
colour change due to the ribs. Roman glassmakers also produced
sculptural objects in transparent monochrome colours, for example a
copper blue fish which probably used to be the cover for a serving dish.12

Today, the centre of glass casting is the Czech Republic. There, casting

12
Price, Richard W. The Corning Museum of Glass, A guide to the collections. Corning, New
York: The Corning Museum of Glass, 2001.

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developed independently from the western studio glass movement, behind

the iron curtain. Building on a tradition of factory glass, Czech artists, led
by husband and wife team Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová,
developed new casting and annealing techniques, and for the first time it
became possible to cast large solid glass forms. While elsewhere, glass
artists were working mostly vessel-based, here a tradition of fully-fledged
sculpture and large-scale architectural work was established.

Libenský and Brychtová collaborated over a period of 48 years, producing

a large body of work, which demonstrates a thorough exploration of light
and colour in space. They began experimenting with volume colour, or
‘painting with light’, in the late fifties and early sixties in their relief works
like Animal Reliefs, Lap and Grey Composition. From thin, light areas to
dark thick areas, a whole palette of monochromes is available to ‘paint’
with. Three-dimensional curves and angles translate into subtle shading of
light and dark.

An exploration into clear optical glass and the way it interacts with light
began in the seventies, with the initial small sculpture Sphere in Cube
(1970) quickly leading to large architectural work.

The knowledge of volume colour and optical geometric sculpture was

combined in the eighties, most notably in the Head series. Geometric
shapes are divided by angular planes, polished surfaces both reflect and
refract the light, matt, translucent surfaces contain the light and obscure
the view into the interior. The full beauty of these pieces is only revealed
with time: as the ambient light changes, so does the light within. Different
panes light up and turn dark; and again, one has to turn to optics to try to
understand these phenomena. The light can enter freely through a
polished surface, if it hits the surface straight on. However, the shallower
the angle, the more light is reflected, until hardly any light enters at all.
All this changes with a matt surface, where light is scattered. Here, part of
the light hitting the inside surface is reflected back into the piece, which

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causes the almost eerie luminosity inherent in solid glass.

The glass used in Libenský and Brychtová’s castings is usually

monochrome, although often a single casting appears to have several
colours. Red Pyramid, for example, shows not only a change in colour
value (lightness) as the volume changes from thick to thin, it actually
shows a change in hue: from yellow to red to brown. Orange-red glass
appears yellow where thin, if it is thin enough, and yellow or amber glass
appears red where thick, if thick enough. Green Eye of the Pyramid
changes from deep green to a bright greenish yellow. Much of the
knowledge of colour and light comes from empirical explorations: Green
Eye of the Pyramid consists of two intersecting parts of a half cone, and
the area where the forms intersect, the eye, glows as if lit from behind.
The artists themselves were surprised by this effect.13

Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, Green Eye of the Pyramid

A different sort of colour change occurs in the sculpture series Silhouette

of the Town, where ‘Safirin’ glass is used. This is a dichromatic glass,
which appears blue in transmitted, but brown in reflected light.

13
Kehlmann, Robert, The Inner Light, Sculpture by Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava
Brychtová. Seattle: The Museum of Glass, 2002, p. 33

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

Colour in space is also František Vízner’s medium. His non-functional

pared down sculptural forms still hold the essence of a vessel. Various
thicknesses of glass allow the colour to become translucent at the thin
edges, then seemingly to diffuse into space. An interesting effect occurs in
his ‘untitled’ bowl with point, exhibited both in the V&A and in the Corning
Museum of Glass. Even though the point itself is thin, it appears dark.

An Illusion of Volume Colour

Martin Rosol, the Eye, cut, polished, and laminated optical glass

Volume colour is colour that fills a 3-dimensional space and changes

appearance with different thicknesses. An illusion of volume colour can be
achieved through optical effects. If a clear sculpture is assembled by
lamination of cut and polished parts, the glue lines act from certain angles
as reflectors, while being completely invisible from other angles. If the
glue is coloured, the whole object, or parts, can appear coloured from
some angles. From other angles, it appears clear. The appearance of
colour resembles closely the appearance of volume colour, but doesn’t
have its properties. The hue, intensity and value appear like the colour in
the glue and do not change with the thickness of the glass.

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

An example of this method of colouring glass is Martin Rosol’s the Eye:

this piece is assembled from two parts, with the glue coloured green. The
glue line can be seen in the image on the left; it is the dark curved line
bisecting the glass diagonally. There is no colour whatsoever in the glass;
the colour apparent in the centre and right images are reflections from the
glue line.

Another method to achieve an appearance of a coloured volume can be

observed in some works by Ben Edols and Kathy Elliot. A layer of opaque
colour is encased in a thick layer of clear glass, the surface of which is
wheel cut to achieve a matt texture. This causes the colour to reflect from
the internal surface of the matt skin, suffusing the clear glass with colour.

Clear or White?

Captive Audience, a piece in the contemporary glass collection in the V&A

by David Reekie, is made from clear glass. In spite of this, it doesn’t
appear clear, but rather translucent white, and impossible to see through.
It is the matt surface, which scatters, diffuses and internally reflects the
light and causes a whitish translucence and a luminous glow from within.
If these pieces where polished, like Koichiri Yamamoto’s vessel parodies,
they would appear transparent.

Reekie’s new body of work, Exchange of Information, contains both

surface colour, in form of enamels applied in a painterly fashion on the
bases, and translucent volume colour in the heads. These have a slightly
soapy, alabaster like appearance, which is characteristic of the pâte de
verre technique of casting, resulting from the glass being suffused by
small bubbles that internally diffuse and reflect light. The luminosity of
Reekie’s heads gives a transient appearance, emphasised by the contrast
with the opaque, solid, surface-coloured bases.

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

David Reekie, A Captive Audience? 2001

An Absence of Colour

Contrary to other materials, in glass it is possible to have a complete

absence of colour. The optical properties of clear transparent glass have
been utilised by many artists. Clear glass is the material of choice for a
variety of reasons: David Reekie uses it to create neutral generic figures,
while in Silvia Levenson’s work, it lends a sense of unreality or absence.
Her pieces include children’s shoes and clothes, their pastels reminiscent
of the colouring in old photos, or translucent knifes raining down on a
candy-coloured village. Beth Lipman’s blown still life sculptures recreate
old paintings, and absence of colour expresses opulence and old-world
charm, using the idea of a disdain for colour as a mark of refinement and
distinction, as it used to be seen in several European and Oriental
cultures.

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The Translucency of Pâte de verre

Pâte de verre refers to the sintering or melting of granules of glass in a

mould, which creates a semi-opaque to translucent appearance. This can
be done by either applying a paste of glass powder and a binder to the
surface of a mould, for thin-walled pieces, or by filling the whole mould
with glass granulates. Varying degrees of translucency can be achieved by
controlling the temperature and length of the firing. The glass can be
grainy and opaque if only just sintered, as in Diana Hobson’s delicate
vessels, or translucent as in some of Argy-Rousseau’s (1885-1953)
figures and Steven Easton’s The Snow Queen’s Realm (2004-5), or
anywhere in between. Developed in the second half of the nineteenth
century by sculptor Henry Cros (1840-1907) for its potential for
polychrome sculpture, the technique was extensively used in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As other cast glass solids, pâte-
de verre objects exhibit distinct luminosity from within. Because of the
countless bubbles, the quality of luminosity is entirely different.

Heike Brachlow, Waiting IV, 2008

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

Opalescent glass

The term opalescent describes a translucent milky appearance similar to

pâte de verre. However, the effect results from colouring agents in, or
treatment of the glass, rather than the particle size before casting, and
this glass is usually bubble-free. Opalescent glass was developed during
the art Nouveau period and extensively used by Louis Comfort Tiffany and
René Lalique. Usually seen in pressed or mould-blown glass, a colour
change can often be observed between thick and thin areas of the glass;
milky white, for example, frequently changes to blue in thick areas.
Opalescent pressed glass can look similar to pâte de verre, and also
appears to glow from within.

René Lalique, Suzanne Statuette, 1925

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Conclusion: Colour, Glass and Light

Colour in glass can appear as volume or surface colour, as a transparent

membrane or as a solid coloured mass, as spectral colours or optical
illusions. However, its appearance always depends on the illumination.
Physicists say that colour is light, and since I have started working with
rare earth glasses, I am inclined to agree. Illumination should be treated
as an integral part of a glass object, rather than as an afterthought,
ignored, or left to the gallery or museum. The relationship of colour and
light is especially evident where rare earth elements are used as colouring
agents. These, especially neodymium oxide, cause colour to change in
different lighting conditions. An object that is pink in daylight, for
example, can be bright green in fluorescent light, yellow in LED, and blue
in sodium mercury high intensity discharge (HID) lamps. Suddenly, the
colour doesn’t belong to the object anymore, it is a separate factor, and
changeable in a way that can’t be overlooked. This, for me, exposes and
shifts all sorts of preconceptions.

Heike Brachlow, Orbit I (2007), photographed in tungsten light of

different intensities, and fluorescent light

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 Heike Brachlow 2008

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