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Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
Light from Light
2010
self-powered geodesic dome, custom-built photovoltaic panels, acrylic, neon and aluminium frame
Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have been working collaboratively since the mid 1980s. In
a variety of modes they have pursued primarily semiotic concerns, referencing in particular the
languages of art, design, popular culture and feminism.
Their self-powered sculpture
Light from Light
was commissioned for the exhibition and was the
result of a MAAP residency held in Brisbane and Shanghai. Having worked with solar technologies
previously through an artist residency at IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia),
the artists sought to expand their interests in the potential for photovoltaics as an artistic
medium. In this work the artists use text illuminated in neon and light-emitting diodes to
meditate on the poetic process of solar technology – making light from light.
Supporting and powering the neon work, Burchill and McCamley’s solar-harvesting geodesic
structure is a direct tribute to Richard Buckminster Fuller’s original utopian design. Fuller’s
simple geometric structure has been an enduring symbol of utopian thinking since it entered
the popular imaginary of the future in the 1960s. Reimagining this iconic architectural form as a
renewable energy structure, Burchill and McCamley reinvigorate Fuller’s commitment to design,
engineering and science as the instruments of radical, visionary change. Their use of acrylic and
neon, familiar to the artists’ collaborative body of work, is perhaps also a reference to the
industrial materials embraced by techno-utopians like Fuller, as well as to the minimalist oeuvre.
As a monument to the redemptive promise of renewable energy,
Light from Light
is compromised
by its own limited utility; namely, the scale of the solar-harvesting structure seems vastly
disproportionate to the volume of power it generates. However it is the very implausibility of
their solution to the problems of the present that reinforces their affectionate critique of the
utopian tradition.
