New James Turrell ‘Skyspace’

‘I imagined the Meeting house was a convertible, opening up to the sky.'

A large installation by the distinguished Quaker artist James Turrell has opened in Massachusetts. Titled C.A.V.U., it is the latest of his iconic ‘Skyspaces’. The work comprises a repurposed concrete water tank that transforms into an immersive light installation. The artwork measures forty feet in diameter, is forty feet high, and has a capacity for seventy viewers. It took thirty years to create from conception. The installation opened on the Mass MoCA campus in May, as part of ‘Into the Light’, a retrospective of Turrell’s work.

‘This is a special moment,’ Joseph Thompson, former director of Mass MoCA, told The Berkshire Beagle. ‘This is a quasi-completion of a collection. We now have one major work from each of the seven decades of James’ career. It’s a really wonderful breadth of work. It’s come full circle.’

Plans to install one of Turrell’s Skyspaces in Friends House in London were dropped in 2012. Trustees for Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) had ‘concerns that to install the major artwork may be in conflict with the Quaker commitment to become a low-carbon sustainable community and may not be a right use of money’.

A minute from the time stated: ‘We have also heard of concerns that the installation does not necessarily reflect our concept of the Light being from within, reflecting our experiential approach to spirituality and faith.’

According to The Berkshire Beagle, James Turrell dreamt up his first Skyspace as a child, sitting in Quaker silence.

‘I imagined the Meeting house was a convertible, opening up to the sky,’ he said on a recent tour.

The now ‘unlapsed Quaker’ has said that each Skyspace is a recreation of his grandmother’s explanation of what Quakers were trying to accomplish as they sat in silence. ‘She would say, “Go inside and meet the light. Go into the light,’’ he said. ‘You do have to go inside to meet the light. The light of meditation is met inside by waiting for it.’

James Turrell was born into a Wilburite Quaker family, which practised plain speech and plain dress and lived without electricity. The eighty-seven-year-old artist has said that the Quaker idea of light is ever present in his work.

Mass MoCA is also showing the Lapsed Quaker Ware ceramics collection by Turrell and Nicholas Moore. This series of black basalt tableware ceramics was inspired by the eighteenth-century black basalt work of English potter Josiah Wedgewood, who created designs that were simpler than his usual creations, for the US Quaker market.

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