Research & Development

 

Winter Residency: Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed

The Vision…

‘Home is Where the Heart Beats’ (working title) is an immersive light and sound installation that listens to a space and reveals its living rhythm - a heartbeat that emerges through shared presence and resonance.

KEYWORDS:

Immersive Experience; Playful Co-creation; Interactive Installation; Creative technology; Materiality: Embodiment; Shared Presence

What?

  • Inspired by the physical principle of synchronisation - observed by Christiaan Huygens in 1665

  • An exploration of how people and places influence one another over time

  • Just as pendulums or metronomes gradually fall into rhythm, the work considers how human presence, memory, and emotion find coherence within shared environments

  • Investigates the idea of home as something created through relationships and lived experience rather than architecture alone.

  • Home isn’t just a place. It’s people, objects, histories, atmospheres and architecture

  • Home is where the heart is

How?

  • Visitors’ heartbeats are measured and translated into a personal colour and rhythm

  • A field of vertical light columns responds in real time, pulsing with each participant as they move through the space

  • When people come close together, their rhythms merge and synchronise; when they separate, individuality re-emerges

  • The installation “remembers” visitors through fading light traces that accumulate into a collective background pulse

  • Light and subtle sound create an immersive, accessible environment that behaves like a living, responsive organism

  • Participants co-create the atmosphere through movement, proximity, and presence

Why?

  • Reveals the unseen connections through which people, spaces, and technologies continuously shape one another.

  • Suggests that identity and environment emerge through relationship rather than existing independently

  • Centres immediate, embodied experience as a counterpoint to increasingly disembodied digital interaction

  • Reframes technology as a gentle listener that amplifies connection rather than surveillance

  • Uses technology not to simulate reality, but to deepen sensitivity to the real, inviting visitors to feel themselves as part of a shared, evolving ecology

  • Draws on a practice journey from VFX to glassmaking, bringing digital responsiveness into dialogue with material and physical experience

The Story So Far….

 

Starting from scratch: Learning to control LEDs by coding an Arduino

Early Arduino and NeoPixel LED investigations. Got Arduino controlling LEDs, programmed in a ‘pulseWave’, tried triggering via motion sensor, but there’s too much delay. It’s not the right tool for the job I want it to do. An Ultrasound Proximity sensor is far more responsive and closer to what I want to happen!

Setting the timing of the ‘wavePulse’ was tricky - included smoothing readings, setting conditional boundaries and ‘locking in’ pulse rate. Next stage was getting 2 sensors working at the same time, to trigger different LEDs in different colours, including the pulse wave then mixing the colours at the meeting point. The last video brings us onto my first material investigations…

Beginning Material Investigations

First Material Investigations - looking at the lights through different materials, using what is to hand. At this point I prefer the opaque white perspex with the lights set back so it becomes a moving glow rather than individual LEDs

I prefer the more opaque things so far - liking the 3 perspex sheets

Not sure these diffuse the individual lights enough as they are so close - even with 3 layers

Bubble wrap works really well to diffuse the light, making it a pulsing glow.

But… it looks like bubble wrap…

I really like the sculptural feel of the white fabric here

Tried out a couple of combinations, but don’t think i have the right one yet. I want to try the fabric behind the white opaque plastic and the bubblewrap behind the white plastic.

I absolutely love the way the lights look behind my caustic lens - I actually have quite a few of these, maybe I could use a few joined together? It would take a lot of cold working though, and I’d need a strong frame for them. I love that the caustic patterns are metaphors for the connections and interactions though…

keep coming back to the paraphrased Georges Braque quote…

THINK NOT OF THINGS BUT THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THEM

To be continued….. keep checking in!

 

Past Projects

Naturally Focused I

Naturally Focused I: Wall based Interactive Installation, School of Physics, HH Wills Physics Laboratory, Bristol University 2025

Naturally Focused I embodies my exploration of caustics - natural singularities of light where rays converge to infinity in illuminated networks.

The central lens was formed through an intuitive process of glassblowing, which I understand as co-creation: I do not impose upon inert matter, but respond to the molten glass as it responds to me. This indeterminate relational process of making is then brought into dialogue with precision. The lens was waterjet-cut to a perfect circle to reinforce its optical identity, and its edges highly polished to reveal its internal structure. It performs its function visibly, as the light-material interaction and resulting projections, are both the meaning and method of the work.

The glass is suspended within stainless steel gyroscopic rings, held away from the wall by a polished brass support and stainless steel backplate. Designed in CAD and machine-fabricated, this juxtaposition highlights the interplay of chaos and order. The rings allow viewers to tilt and reorient the lens, activating caustic projections with sunlight or an adjustable LED.

The apparatus is not separate from what it reveals, but is integral to the phenomena produced and open to rearrangement.  An engraved brass element is engraved with the mathematical generating functions that describe the singularities visible on the glass surface and, in certain conditions, on the wall behind. The electrical cable plots an Airy function curve, which describes the diffraction pattern at the edge of a ‘fold’ caustic.

Referencing both historical scientific instruments and contemporary quantum equipment, the work acknowledges the enduring study of caustics, from the first known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci to current astro and quantum physics.

Created in collaboration with Sir Michael Berry, Emeritus Melville Wills Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol, it is permanently display in the HH Wills Physics Laboratory, and was shortlisted for ArtEvol at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The work materialises the entanglement of glass and light, intuition and precision, theory and phenomenon, where meaning arises through co-creation between material, light, and viewer.

Naturally Focused II

Naturally Focused II: Wall based Interactive Installation 2025

Naturally Focused II continues an ongoing investigation into the intra-action of glass and light. At its centre is a hand-blown glass lens formed through an intuitive, relational making process, in which material and maker respond to one another. The lens was later cut to a precise circular form and highly polished, revealing its internal structure and reinforcing its optical identity.

Suspended within stainless steel gyroscopic rings, the lens can be physically tilted and reoriented by the viewer. As light passes through the glass, it gathers, concentrates, fractures, and disperses, generating shifting caustic patterns that evolve in response to movement, position, and changing light conditions. These luminous projections reveal light not as something that simply illuminates the object, but as an active, responsive material in its own right.

Meaning in the work arises through interaction. Each adjustment produces a distinct optical event, shaped by the entangled presence of glass, light, environment, and viewer. Naturally Focused II operates simultaneously as object and event, inviting embodied engagement and attentive looking, where perception completes the work’s unfolding.

Naturally Focused III

Naturally Focused III: Interactive Light and Glass 2025


A free-standing exploration of light, glass, and relational making. A polished lens, born from an early waterjet cutting accident, is suspended in gyroscopic brass and steel rings, inviting viewers to tilt and reorient it.

Shifting caustic projections emerge through sunlight or LED, making the interplay of material, light, and participation both the method and meaning of the work. The tripod support, crafted from antique brass and a 3D-printed connecting element, references historical scientific instruments while embracing contemporary design.

Contingency and indeterminacy are embraced as active collaborators: unforeseen material outcomes and constraints shape the work, reflecting the ongoing dialogue between intuition, craft, and technological precision.

By engaging with the piece, viewers co-create ephemeral patterns of light and shadow, experiencing firsthand how meaning arises through encounter, participation, and the dynamic entanglement of matter, light, and perception.

This was shortlisted for the 8th John Ruskin Prize and shown as part of the exhibition at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London


Entangling With Light

‘Entangling With Light’ Installation of Glass and Light, July 2025



This is an immersive installation where a mirrored glass sculpture rotates slowly on a plinth, illuminated by a single LED.

As light passes through and around the glass, caustic patterns are projected into the surrounding space. The viewer’s body becomes a temporary surface for these patterns, inviting active participation and creating a literal entanglement between audience, light, material, space and time.

The work demonstrates how complex, dynamic phenomena can emerge from simple elements - a single sculpture, a single light - highlighting the richness of relational interactions and the beauty of unpredictability.

Waves of Radiance

‘Waves of Radiance’ Royal William Yard, Plymouth October 2024


Three coloured hand blown glass disks rotate slowly in the path of a spotlight, casting shifting patterns of changing coloured light and shadow. Reflected caustics dance across the surrounding walls, while refracted caustics are projected onto the window screen.

Visitors can walk in and around the installation, becoming temporary surfaces for the projections. Their movement and presence actively shape the visual experience, drawing them into the field of interactions and entangling them with light, glass, space and time.

The work highlights how complex, relational phenomena emerge from simple elements - glass disks, light, and human presence - emphasizing participation, embodiment, and the shared creation of experience.

Lucent: A Bit of Light Relief

‘Lucent: A Bit of Light Relief’ Installation of Glass, Light and Sound, March 2024



This immersive installation was a series of suspended hand blown glass spheres, with internal colour-shifting LEDs. The accompanying soundscape consists of sounds made exclusively with the glass spheres in the installation, by knocking, striking or blowing into them.

‘Lucent’ means clear or luminous. Sounding similar to ‘Lucid’ I particularly enjoy the metaphor of light and clarity of thought.

Situated in Arts University Plymouth, visitors happen across the space serendipitously, as they traverse the University, inviting unexpected meditative encounters with light and resonance and transforming a corridor into a site of discovery.


Entangled Light

‘Entangled Light I, II & III’ Exhibited as part of ‘Mirage: Glass in the Fourth Dimension’ London Glassblowing Gallery, London May 2025

A series of sculptural forms capturing the dynamic entanglement between artist, material, light and viewer.

The memory of creation, shaped by breath, gravity, heat and motion, is held in the glass.

Light activates the forms, creating intricate shifting caustics, that dance across surfaces, inside and outside the objects, ever changing with the light.

As viewers encounter these ephemeral illuminations, they become enmeshed in the experience, co-creating the interplay of perception, material, and light.

The caustics act as both analogy and enactment of interconnected networks, highlighting how nothing exists in isolation and revealing the relational, emergent nature of experience.

These were shown as part of Mirage: Glass in the Forth Dimension at Peter Layton’s Glassblowing Gallery in London.