For 25 years London based artist Keith Bowler has used light to transform a range of overlooked, architectural spaces, however no one could accuse him of taking the easy road. In Zwanziz Ellen (2005) he takes us in the dead of night to an uninhabited tower in a German forest. A beam of light ricochets through one of its windows onto a tiny magnetic mirror and out of another. In another nocturnal scenario Light House (2002) we find ourselves closer to home, just off Brick Lane where he lives. Not only has he illuminated his own house in pink and gold light, a live orchestra plays outside, sound sensitive light technology synchronising the two.
Photography plays a key role for Bowler, allowing him to frame pertinent moments within a temporal, shifting work but in a more recent project Skylight (2006) we see the artist investigating the medium more directly. Here he explores photography in its very broadest sense, as an old boiler room in a disused warehouse is transformed not only into a site-based installation but a combined camera and darkroom. I met with Bowler in his studio in East London to find out a bit more about the piece.
MB: Keith can describe the installation Skylight .
KB: Skylight was part of a group show called Core and was set in a building due for demolition just off London’s South Bank. I’d only been given two weeks to produce something and found myself gravitating towards a neglected space (the boiler room) not being used by the other artists. The only daylight that entered the room was through the ceiling, which had a small rectangular opening like an aperture and I decided to use that as a focus for the work. I had a large steel shaft made that dropped directly into the hole in the ceiling. It was tapered so it acted as a funnel collecting light along its length and then projecting a ball of light onto the floor.
MB: I remember Skylight lurking in the recesses of the building – you could have missed it, it wasn’t easy to find. When you walked in you were immersed in this dark, sensory space – you had to let your eyes adjust for a moment.
I remember this unnerving, monolithic presence hovering in front of me, and the hushed tones from other people in the space – there was a kind of reverence similar to that of the Rothko Room at the Tate. The unidentifiable form seemed to be floating in space and through this impossibility it seemed quite ominous, as if confronting you with something you don’t understand – like that scene with the monolith in Space Odyssey.
K.B: When I first showed a friend it he said to me ‘where does that light come from?’ I said ‘93 million miles away.’ He didn’t know what I meant!
M.B: How did the work change as the light from the shaft turned from daylight to moonlight?
K.B: It looked dramatically different. At midnight you could just discern a soft glow but in daylight it was bright – like artificial light. There was also a lot of ambient light from the city being reflected upwards and when it rained that came down the chute too, so the work was reliant on both the natural elements and what was happening in the atmosphere.
I originally thought it would be just a patch of light on the ground but the light took on a form and energy of its own and people responded to the space in a particular way, they stayed there for quite long periods of time – it seemed to have a meditative aspect. It’s usually a gamble whether something comes off or not, the installation was improvised, right up to two days before the show the ducting hadn’t arrived from the manufacturers so I had no idea how it was going to work.
MB: Can you talk a bit about how you then turned the room into a combined camera and dark room?
KB: As I was collecting light it occurred to me that the light could be used to produce images on photographic paper, a bit like a photogram. However unlike a photogram there was no actual object as a source, in this case the image was of projected light. In order to make the room lightproof I put a piece of board over the ceiling aperture. Then in the pitch black I got a thirty-foot roll of photograph paper out of its tube, hacked a piece off and placed it under the steel shaft. I then had to shout up to my son Jamie (who was up on the ceiling) to remove the board for a fraction of a second and then replace it.
I had four large tubs of developing materials in the room and so we then developed, fixed and processed the photo on site hosing it down with a hosepipe in the toilets. It was all a bit random it wasn’t calculated - in fact I hadn’t done any wet photography for twenty years.
MB: I remember the first time I saw one of those large photos in your studio I wasn’t sure what I was looking at . It was quite unsettling – this big black fuzzy shape on a huge sheet of photographic paper. There seemed to be no explanation – it just ‘Was.’ It reminded me of that film by John Carpenter The Thing – like some weird presence from another world. The photo had been cut in this urgent, random way – quickly in the dark, using a Stanley knife – no ruler. It gave it a real sense of physicality, emphasizing the work’s production and materiality.
KB: Yes they’re not comfortable images because they are not produced from an object but from a form. I remember the very first photo was a big black blob on a large sheet of paper – it was great. The others were more of a struggle as I then had an expectation and so much was based on chance. I remember when I made the photos I didn’t know what to do with them!
MB: I understand you also made some twelve-foot photographs.
K.B: Yes, I cut twelve foot long pieces of photographic paper and passed them underneath the duct to make images that were somewhere between photographs and drawings. The whole family helped with the process –we were all in the dark, rolling them up, hosing off the chemicals - it was quite a process. The problem is I can’t afford to frame them!
M.B. As well as these photographic experiments you also use photography to document your installations. Do these photos ever become part of the work?
KB: The work is usually temporary so I photograph it as a record for myself but it is not a substitute for the work. However in Skylight the large photographs that I produced on site were not photos of the work but independent pieces of work themselves. I simply used one piece of work to produce another.
MB: That’s interesting as I think many of the photos taken of your installations are actually engaging works in their own right. For instance in the photos of Skylight and Flicker fixer 2 (a project located on Camden Canal) insignificant fixtures are activated by your presence: moonlit pipes, shadowy geometric forms, squiggles of light and ambiguous marks on walls all seem to resonate with each other rhythmically – dancing across the surface in quite a painterly way. As if you are drawing in light.
KB: Although the photos are a record they can be compelling and draw you in. I don’t doctor them. Being site based the work is generated as much by the architecture as anything else.
M.B: Yes there’s a symbiotic relationship with architecture. It’s interesting as architecture often fixes a space bringing with it a set of expectations as to what should and shouldn’t happen within it. Your work disrupts this.
K.B: It’s about changing perception. Architecture organises us and promotes a certain kind of behaviour within a space. It’s about momentarily changing that, so in Skylight a once utilitarian space becomes a meditative one. You have to make all kinds of assessments and adjustments with what’s going on in the space and find associations and meaning in order to contextualise it.
M.B: So what’s next for you?
K.B: I have currently got an installation called Ghost Bridge next to Blackfriars Bridge on The Thames. It’s a laser projection that spans one side of the river to the other in which I’ve re-drawn the original bridge in light.
As I said earlier he is not one to take the easy road.
Publication Date: 
