There are certain things of which you know exactly how they came into your life: people, animals, homes, cities, pieces of landscape and in my case works of specific artists.
My love for light artist James Turell started in Venice in 2007, where my two small sons and I had visited the exhibition Artempo – When Time becomes Art at Palazzo Fortuny.
JAMES TURRELL - RODEN CRATER
‘Stick you hand out’ said the guard, when he saw us standing in front of a luminous rectangle against a flat wall. We were surprised. Never before had we been invited in a museum to touch an artwork. Our hands didn’t touch the wall, but slit through the flat surface into an unknown space.
James Turrell (1943) investigates light, space and our perception of it. It leads to optical illusions and magical experiences. His masterpiece is located in the Arizona desert, where he works on ‘the biggest contemporary artwork’ in the world, that is already called the eight wonder of the world. He turns a deserted volcano into a ‘naked eye observatory’. Roden Crater houses a network of tunnels, passages, circular spaces and elliptical holes that provide a view on the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars.
JAMES TURRELL’S RODEN CRATER IN INTERIOR, HAARLEM 2013
In 2012, I bought a registration picture of Roden Crater, seen in the middle of the ancient desert landscape against a bright blue sky. In the Summer of 2013, I was fortunate enough to visit Roden Crater. It turned into a pelgrimage, a spiritual experience in space and time, because Roden Crater is a consecrated site where the architecture of the sky touches the earth and the moonlight reaches the center of the crater.
