Light on a dark subject
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An interesting take on how mistakes made in lighting sculptures can mar one's visual experience - and at the same time, obscure the significance of these artefacts. And in the author's opinion:
"The commonest reason for such a failure (apart from ignorance and lack of funds) is conservation. Objects made of bronze or stone are mixed up with textiles or ivories or miniatures and other items that require a low illumination. There is absolutely no reason for keeping bronzes in low light. If the low light is there for the sake of the tapestries, then a good museum should recognise that bronzes and tapestries have to be kept apart - if they are to be seen."Perhaps, it should also be added that the choice of display in a museum is also very much a curatorial and design decision.
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Meo @ 2:23PM | March 20th 2004|
ReplyDeleteIn conservation, our requirement is simply to have low lightings for organic materials like paper, textiles, leather, etc. The lighting designers will need to juggle creatively with the lightings to satisfy the requirements from the curators, designers and conservators.
In most cases the exhibition galleries consist of a mixture of materials. To achieve low lightings for organic materials in such instances, one way is to have more lights on the inorganics, so that the organic materials near them are lit indirectly and need only a very low spot lighting. Lightings for areas like the passageways or lights high up in the ceilings also helps to lit up objects and gallery, at the same time cutting down the lux level. The Objecthink exhibition looked much brighter than many others, actually all the lightings are below or around 50 lux for all the paper and garments.
Shelters created by exhibition designs also helps to block out some of the lights for organic materials. In the Pacific War exhibition here, only florescent lights with UV covers were used for the panels of encapsulated printed documents, proper lightings were not possible due to the old electrical wirings. However, the designer hung rolls of small flags on the ceiling, the flags had shielded the papers from direct lightings. Those near the lights were about 100 lux, while those further from the light source were about 60 lux. These are still within our comfortable zones for a temporary exhibition.