recollections of light

In addition to new works, this site documents the final project in Sarah Carter-Jenkins' Master of Design studies: Recollections of Light. The project is an installation exploring a journey through memory, using the medium of light as a link to the remembered images of our collective pasts. Light, in the form of projection, reflection and as a means of illuminating contrast, is the installation's dominant element.

The form of the installation takes its shape from the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, 'wonder rooms', 'memory theatres', names that hint at the collections of extraordinary objects which became a symbol of the collector's power: a world remade in microcosm.

According to contemporary sources, three types of item were indispensable in forming a 'Kunstkammer' or wonder room:

• firstly sculptures and paintings 'the painted eye',
  
• secondly 'curious items from home or abroad',
  
• and thirdly 'antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals'.
  

The digital and physical contents of Recollections of Light give a nod to these three forms, combining them into light, object, reflection and film.

'Giving form to remembered realities and creating new ones, the contents of this 21st century ‘wunderkammer’ are layered in an arbitrary and personal collection of image and object, designing new amalgams of old memories. My research for the project has guided me down paths that hinted of familiarity but whose details were nonetheless new to me, using film-making, light, illustration, installation and sculpture, designed to involve and immerse the viewer in a new version of my own reconstructed and recollected past.'

Sarah Carter-Jenkins

Sydney 2015

Recollections of Light was exhibited, along with a series of small sculpture and film at Sheffer Gallery, Sydney in December 2015 as part of an exhibition entitled Fixation: Collection & Separation.