Here we go!

Welcome to the Art Library of Everything blog.

Here I will share features on artist research, gallery reviews, insights into what is going on within the classroom, student articles and featured artworks, and more.

To kick things off, I want to share one of my favourite contemporary artists with you.

As a student in my first year of university I took an impulsive trip up to London, with the specific intent to visit an installation by artist Anthony McCall. From here an obsession with 'light art' was born.

Solid Light Works, Anthony McCall

I have seen McCall's works in London several times and in Barcelona. He was the focus point of my university dissertation and I will happily visit the same show multiple times.

Like many works that embody the contemporary sublime, it is hard to fully express the experience of visiting one of his exhibitions.

'Feelings of terror, awe, infinity, and minuteness swirl and course through an experience of the sublime in nature, and for centuries, artists from Donatello to Bill Viola have attempted to recreate that experience in their paintings, sculptures, and video projections. Theorized as early as the 1st century, the sublime has captivated writers, philosophers, and artists alike. Through its various definitions and interpretations, at its base, the sublime is a feeling rooted in humans' relationships to the world, to nature, and what lies beyond that helps us to formulate an understanding of ourselves.' Sarah Ingram, The Art Story.

When I walk through McCall's installations, I am at peace. The experience is otherworldly, a simple refraction of light on mist creates valleys that fluctuate and engulf you. There is so much to explore in a space that is so minimal, you can observe the work from different perspectives and angles, you can look at how others relate to it. Are they cautious in how they explore or do they throw themselves into it? It is great exhibition to take children to, because once they realise they can roam freely and interact with the art directly it becomes a playground for them. The attendants affect the artwork, their movement through it changes its form.

'I began making the “solid light” films in 1973, but my work as an artist began earlier, with sculptural performances involving rectilinear grids of small fires. My first film, Landscape for Fire, 1972, was an attempt to describe one of these pieces. But after completing it, my attention pulled back from events in front of the camera and became engaged by the possibility of a film that could exist only in the moment of projection with an audience, without reference to an “elsewhere.” The thirty-minute Line Describing a Cone, made soon after I moved to New York from London in 1973, took the form of the gradual coming-into-being in midair of a complete, hollow cone of light. The proportions of this projection vary, but the scale is large. The base of the cone, an emerging circle of light projected onto the wall, is tall enough, at between eight and eleven feet, to fully incorporate several spectators, and the length of the beam may be anything from thirty to sixty feet. This three-dimensional object, like sculpture, calls for a mobile, participating spectator, and, like film, it takes time. To fully see the emerging form it is necessary to move around and through it, to look at it from the inside and from the outside.' Anthony McCall, 1000 Words, ArtForum