Catching Light is a collaboration between Croatian sculptor Milivoj Šegan and American performer Gillian Rhodes. Milivoj’s digital light paintings of ‘lumino mobile’ are created by putting light in hand-created terracotta sculptures and then photographed with long exposures. Gillian then projected the results onto a white screen and danced in and out of the projections. Finally, all of the pieces were stitched together.
Besides the purely aesthetic appreciation of color and light in Milivoj’s work and how they shift and interact with the performer, we were particularly inspired by scientific principles of light such as the wave/particle duality and the tunneling effect of photons, as well as the creation of the CMB and light’s journey through the universe. In this piece, the paintings of light set the background and the dancer acts a bit like a photon – never fully there, never fully caught, waving in and out of existence in the quantum space. The wave function never really collapses, reaching through and around the barriers.