Lustre

About the work

Lustre explores human finitude in relation to the apparent vastness of nature. Two moving images face one another: sunlight shimmering across the Baltic Sea in Finland, and a solitary figure turning restlessly in bed. The instability of a distant landscape is brought into relation with the unease of a body at rest.

Between the projections, a motor-driven mechanism continuously generates waves in a water tank. Three light sources illuminate its surface, casting reflections that appear, change and disappear across the surrounding space. Recorded light and physically occurring light coexist, but belong to different moments and conditions. The sea remains within a recorded image, while the water and reflections continue to change in the viewer’s immediate surroundings.

The viewer’s attention moves between the filmed body, the landscape, the tank and the reflections. These movements connect the installation’s separate elements and bring anxiety into the space occupied by the viewer’s own body. The contrast between a moment retained in an image and a reflection that cannot be held also opens a gap between the wish to preserve experience and the passage of the present. Lustre is an early investigation of meaning formed through spatial relationships between media, a direction developed further through Willow’s kinetic and material experiments.