Page 80 - Lighting Magazine May 2018

Rarely using color, Tapsco ’s work stands out from other artists working in light for being particularly concerned with the “genius loci” (i.e. the prevailing character or atmosphere of a place) and for creating visual narratives at the shoreline where land meets water and water meets light.
the wild,” Tapsco explains. Diaphanous Bloom will remain in place permanently in its location.
Working with mist is Tapsco ’s analogy of hu- man control over nature, with the mist acting as a “ghostly” reminder of the Earth’s disappearing green spaces. By placing his artwork at the end of a line of similarly sized trees, Tapsco connects his artistic interpretation with the pre-existing site.
The continual mist is created by pumping water through a high-pressure system into ne misting nozzles. “The variety of nozzles available is quite staggering, and something of a rabbit hole I ven- tured into for a project [I did] in Japan, as it was the rst time I’d worked with mist,” he notes. “I had some help from an engineering company in Melbourne that specializes in that technology. They’ve worked on a few creative projects in the past and were happy for me to come in and play around with some di erent options. From there, we added the expertise of another company in Japan which helped design and re ne the system to get the right e ect. A very high level of control can be achieved with the right resources.”
While Tapsco wasn’t the sort of child that was always building something with his hands, he was an accomplished piano player and later studied painting and lm-making while at Curtin University in Perth.
“It’s interesting the number of light artists who have a background in painting,” he remarks. “I nd I can o en tell the ones that do by their work there’s a really high sensitivity to the ‘qualities’ of light and other elements like color and texture. I’m constantly grateful for my background in painting to have honed these qualities in my approach to all materials I work with, and it’s something I’ve only quite recently come to understand.”
Tapsco has been incorporating LED lighting in his work. “The rst few projects I did a er my departure from painting used incandescent bulbs and uorescent tubes – which meant I had to carry around heavy generators in places that were o en inaccessible by vehicle – something I de nitely don’t miss,” he quips. “Now that LEDs are power- ful enough, I’ve really enjoyed using them for their portability, color control (with the higher-quality products) and the ability to use them discretely within the space or the structure, so that the light itself takes center stage. [Overall] I try to avoid complicated technology, as it can be a real bar- rier between people and their experience of the space. Since I try to work with elemental materi- als (sand, salt, water, mist, light) I keep my lighting equipment simple, too.”
This award-winning artist is perhaps best known internationally for a 2017 installation at the Japan
76 enLIGHTenment Magazine | May 2018
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