Skyspace – Seldom Seen by James Turrell. ‘Lightscape’ light installation exhibition at Houghton Hall, Norfolk
Saturday 8th August 2015
Another installation experienced at James Turrell’s Lightscape exhibition was Skyspace. Walking through the gardens of Houghton Hall I came across this building of wood construction on stilts that had no windows on any of the four walls. Around the perimeter was a sloping gangway that lead to the doorway into the building. Entering through two sets of doors I walked in and discovered that it consisted of a single room approximately 8 metres square. Around the walls reclined seating was built into the structure made from unpainted wood. The wall space above the seating and the ceiling was a smooth surface painted white. In the centre of the ceiling was an aperture approximately 3 metres square that formed a window to what was obviously the sky above. This was an open aperture with no glass or other barrier. It was simply a ‘window’ in the ceiling. Visually there was no reveal where the ceiling ended and the window began. It was as if the ceiling was paper thin and it created a frame to the image of the sky. That was very important to this piece.
The viewer of this installation sat on the slightly reclined seating and looked up to see what was to all intents and purposes a ‘picture on the ceiling’. The ceiling created the frame for the ‘picture’ that was potentially ever changing, because the scene was the actual sky. Initially there were no clouds in the sky so what I saw was pure azure blue with the occasional silhouette of a bird flying high up. The scene changed as the image of the sky began to fill with cloud. The sky image was also somehow intensified by the framing of it. It was very relaxing experience and I sat there for a good 20 minutes even though the image I was looking at was just a section of the sky above. It was almost mesmerising, meditative, sitting there looking through this window to the sky. It was a little like the game you played as children laying on the ground staring up at the sky when there were a few clouds floating by and you’d try and ‘see’ images within them.
External photo © Richard Humphrey : Internal photo © Ian Burt
