Light as Material

I. Looking at light

Colour was probably my first way into thinking about light.

When I paint, I am constantly watching how colour changes with the hour, with the direction of the light, with the surface beside it. A red can become warmer, a blue can almost disappear into shadow, and even white is never really just white. The colour may stay the same, but our experience of it does not.

That was probably the beginning of my fascination with light.

At first, I noticed it through painting: the way light creates contrast, brings one part of a surface forward and lets another recede. But as I started working more with interiors and with the house, I realised I was observing the same thing on a much larger scale.

A room changes with light in exactly the same way.

We tend to talk about stone, timber, paint, textiles and glass as the materials that make an interior, but none of them exists independently of light. Light reveals texture, shifts colour, creates shadow and can alter the atmosphere of a room without moving a single thing inside it.

For me, that makes light a material in its own right.

And there is something deeply human about it. Light can make a space feel warmer, quieter, more open or more intimate. We respond to those changes instinctively, often before we have even noticed what caused them.

II. Bringing light into the house

I notice this most clearly in places where light and art have always had a close relationship — old buildings, churches, spaces where colour, stone and glass are allowed to change throughout the day. I often photograph stained glass, not simply because the windows are beautiful, but because of what happens when light passes through them. Colour leaves the glass and becomes part of the architecture. It lands on stone, moves across walls and changes the feeling of the whole space.

That idea became especially important while working on the house.

This is a space where art will live, so the quality of light matters to me as much as the objects, colours and materials within it. I want paintings to respond to the room, and the room to change around them as the day moves on.

In the kitchen, this became a very practical decision. The room needed more daylight, but I did not want to lose the character of the old building. Eventually, I chose to raise part of the roofline slightly and introduce a narrow band of glass above the wall.

It was a relatively small architectural intervention, but it changed the room much more than I expected. Daylight now enters from above and moves across the space throughout the day. The walls respond differently, the colours shift, and the whole room feels more open.

Observing how light shapes space - from old architecture to the house.

What stayed with me was that I had not added anything decorative to the kitchen. I had simply changed the way light was allowed to enter it.

That, to me, is the larger point. Light should not be something we solve at the end of a room. Where it comes from, where it lands and what it touches should be part of the design from the beginning.

I like the idea that a room should not look exactly the same in the morning and in the evening. It should move with the day.

III. From architecture to object

The same idea exists at a much smaller scale. This is one reason I am increasingly drawn to glass and crystal objects. They interact with light in a way that many other materials do not. Glass can filter it, reflect it, distort it or allow it to pass through. Cut crystal can catch even a small amount of light and send it in several directions.

I often think of these objects as taking light and giving it back to the room.

A coloured glass candleholder may sit quietly on a table during the day. Then sunlight reaches it, and suddenly a small patch of amber appears somewhere else. In the evening, with a candle inside, the same object creates a completely different atmosphere.

The object has not changed. The light has. This is also how I am beginning to think about the objects I bring into TheColourNest. I am interested not only in what an object looks like by itself, but in what happens around it. What does it reflect? What kind of shadow does it create? How does it respond to daylight? What happens when the room becomes darker?

For me, these are simply different scales of the same idea. A roof opening can bring light into a room. Architecture can direct it. A small glass or crystal object can catch it once it is inside and send it somewhere else.

Whether I am looking at a painting, altering part of the house or placing a small object on a table, I find myself returning to the same questions:

Where does the light come from? Where will it land? And what will it change?

That is probably why light has become so important to me. It is invisible, but it shapes almost everything we experience in a space.