Eye - 23 August 2013
From new light to James Turrell at the Guggenheim Museum
New light
There is inspiration to be found all around us, in the natural world… Are you open to new light from whatever source it may come?
- Advices & queries 7
One fine July evening saw half-a-dozen intrepid Friends rendezvous in the old town cemetary turned nature reserve in Stroud. The mission? Seeking new light.
Mary Brown, of Stroud Meeting, wrote to Eye to illuminate their quest:
‘A glow worm’s light is illusive, often part hidden in the foliage. We need to walk slowly in the dark, searching diligently. Then one of the group sees one. We all gather round, amazed at its brightness, its greenish glow. We wonder how we could nearly have missed it. Yet move slightly to one side, view it from another angle and its light vanishes.
‘After this first sighting we no longer mistake a white flower for a glow worm, although moonlight on a wet leaf can still fool us.’
The experience clearly resonated with Friends, as Mary reflects: ‘Glow worms live solitary, seemingly unfulfilled, lives, hardly moving from where they hatch. The female does not fly, she lights up on midsummer nights and the male flies around seeking her light. When he finds her they mate briefly, her light goes out, she lays her eggs and then dies. They have fulfilled their life’s purpose: eggs for next year’s resurrection.
‘In the few weeks that she glows, the female glow worm offers us a unique, magical light. We can only stand and stare and wonder at this miracle of nature. Let us be open to it.’
Lion-like Lyn
Eye sincerely apologises for inspiring the Afterword, ‘The Friend has changed my sex’.
It transpires that Lyn Wilson, of Cambridge Hartington Grove Meeting, who lay in alpine meadows in last week’s Eye (16 August) should not have been referred to as ‘she’.
He writes: ‘I’m one of the few in England (lots in Wales) male Lyns.’
Some industrious digging unearthed the fact that ‘Lyn’ in Welsh is a diminutive of Llewellyn, meaning ‘leader’ or ‘lion-like’.
Thankfully Lyn himself graciously did not roar when he spotted the error. ‘I often receive letters, “Dear Madam”. Many years ago I booked a place at a Youth Hostel and must have forgotten to tick the box M or F; I got to the hostel and the warden said, observing my beard, “I put you in the women’s dorm, I guess I’d better throw you out”.’
The writing on the wall
Geoff Braithwaite, of St Albans Meeting, got in touch to share some social commentary spotted in the customer toilet of a local shop. The grafitti – and retort – read:
People are suffering because you think you’re special
They are suffering because they think they aren’t
Turrell’s triumph
Our Friend Judy Kirby, in Northumberland, has alerted Eye to a story at New York’s famous Guggenheim Museum. She writes:
‘Quakers like to think of James Turrell, the installation artist, as theirs. His medium is light and his mastery of it in numerous shapes and forms has given him an enduring reputation, as the work of other creators of installation art has become more theatrical and easily forgotten.
‘Turrell is currently being celebrated in a major exhibition of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. And his genius is wowing the critics it seems. The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl calls the show “air conditioning for the eye and, if you’re gamely susceptible, the soul”.
‘The critic thinks Turrell is “the veteran wizard of installations that involve illusory effects of light, both natural and artificial.” In Houston, the Live Oak Meeting House has a Turrell retractable roof, which reveals the setting sun in a deep Texan sky.
‘Turrell told the critic that he has never ceased to value his childhood in a family of traditionalist Quakers (Wilburites). “There is something of the silent Meeting house, awaiting visitations of the Spirit, about all his works,” says Schjeldahl. “Turrell is coolly pragmatic in his way of conceiving art. But, should some people chance to have theophanies this summer at the Guggenheim, I doubt that he would mind.” Sad to recall, then, that the opportunity to have a permanent Turrell skyspace in the roof of Friends House was missed last year.’
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