Forest of Light is an arboreal variation on my work Field of Light, which was originally conceived in 1992 during a trip I took through the Red Desert in central Australia. Deserts have an incredible feeling of energy and ideas seemed to radiate from them along with the heat. They also have incongruities: they seem to be infertile, barren places until it rains and they bloom like a veritable Eden. I wanted to create an illuminated field of stems that, like the dormant seed in a dry desert, would bloom after darkness falls with gentle rhythms of light under a blazing blanket of stars. By placing an alien installation in the midst of nature, the enormous contrast allows one to literally see the wood from the trees, and that has always been the focus since the idea first germinated so many years ago.
