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Posted: Tuesday, 11th November 2008

All artists have to deal with light but some become captured by it, making it the subject of their work--and the obsession of their lives.

In Imagine… Let there Be Light Alan Yentob has some extraordinary encounters with the artists for whom light is both source and inspiration for their art. Liliane Lijn explains the mysteries of Aerogel, a magical extra-terrestrial substance designed to capture stardust; United Visual Artists (UVA) make people behave in extraordinary ways with their interactive light and sound installations; Charles Ross brings the mysteries of sunlight down to earth with giant lens es and prisms; Anthony McCall turns light into solid-looking sculptures that unfold in the darkness.

Finally, Alan has his world turned upside down by a visit to Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the middle of the Arizona desert that artist James Turrell has transformed over the course of 30 years into a temple dedicated to light and our perception of light. By harnessing and manipulating light’s protean power and by side-stepping rationality, narrative and high concept strategies, this is art that works directly on perceptions and emotions provoking profound and sometimes unsettling questions about both. As James Turrell says: ‘We like to think that this is the rational world we’re receiving through our senses, but that isn’t the way it works. It’s what’s behind the eye that forms the reality that we create. My art is about your seeing’.