Artist Statement

The luminous darkness is my field of inquiry. After a series of bizarre encounters with various forms of light, I began working with elemental light as my medium; utilizing light optics, holographic techniques, and glass sculpture in my arts-based research.

My exploration of light reflects the alchemical process and is an investigation into consciousness. This nigredo stage of alchemy, or “the blackening,” is the mysterious domain of death, fear, and the unconscious. My body of work uses darkness and luminosity to embody subjectivity and transformation, and addresses the notion that it is only in working with the darkness that a luminosity specific to transformation can emerge.

Profile

Chrissy Stuart is a light sculpture artist and arts-based researcher.
She works in the scientific field of optics, employing elemental light as her artistic medium. As a depth psychological scholar, Stuart takes a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge in her process of inquiry and utilizes arts-based research as methodological tools in her practice.
Chrissy’s research is rooted in the essential mysteries of the human experience: death, Nature, and the imagination. Her light sculpture work is an ongoing process of probing the borderlands between the real and the imaginal, the visible and invisible, the material and immaterial, in her quest to understand the hidden forces beyond our control. As such, all of her projects are collaborative in nature, a performative gesture to the quantum realm. Her light sculpture work and arts-based research perpetually reveals that consciousness is transformed by an encounter with the unknown.
Chrissy lives and works in the Mojave Desert, where her light lab is located and where she is also developing her light sculpture work.