Dolmen Light Hondsrugtunnel Emmen The Netherlands
Halo neon City of Utrecht The Netherlands
Flower from the Universe interactive light installation (London)
Titia Ex
Artist Titia Ex works with light, movement and spatial perception. The work is always in a dialogue with its physical surroundings and is incomplete without it. The history of a site or the current use of the space plays a significant part in the interpretation of the art works. Through light installations she intervenes in time, space and energy of the environment.
Dolmen Light
The Dutch city of Emmen lies on the southern end of the Hondsrug, a 70 kilometer sand ridge crossing the province of Drenthe, to continue up to the city of Groningen. About 5500 years ago, the area was a major center of the Funnel Beaker Culture. The soil contains huge boulders, transported there from Southern Scandinavia by glaciers and used as building materials to make the mysterious dolmens (Hunebedden). Dolmen Light is based on these special boulders, ‘The Gold of Drenthe’, and located in a newly built tunnel. The tunnel walls represent the Hondsrug soil: dark boulders and organic spaces in-between. When looking in from outside a dolmen, you merely see black holes, but once you enter it, you are able to see the daylight vividly sparkling and twinkling between the boulders. The light installation reflects the past and connects it to the present with today’s latest techniques: a passage in time.
Halo
A permanent light circle, diameter 13 feet, floating above the crest of the lower chapel of the Roman Catholic Church Saint Willibrord in the city of Utrecht. The church was built in 1877, a time in the Netherlands when Catholics were again able to express their faith by building new churches. The entrance is humble, in a residential street with small shops, the church disappears out of sight, is invisible. The work of art establishes a link between the church and its surroundings; the silent gesture taking the church out of its shadow. The circle of light – comprising two neon lines, a golden yellow inner circle and a pure white outer circle – is both dynamic and static, it connects the space to a human sense of history. The intensity of the light in the artwork draws your eyes upwards only to disappear into the black hole, experiencing another dimension of space in the city.
Flower from the Universe
A gigantic light flower, seeming to float above the surface, with a heart modeled on a nerve cell, encircled by a garland of graceful stems. By walking around the artwork, the visitor sets off a wave of moving colors. The flower records the colors surrounding it and transfers these to the “petals” into which the garland is divided. Near the borders between the petals, the reflected colors gradually fade into one another. The nerve cell in the heart has illuminated offshoots that follow or are in contrast with the colors in the garland. A dynamic interplay is created with both the viewer and the surroundings influencing the light flower. Various locations including: Brussels, London,Jerusalem, Frankfurt.
