This month we are exploring the theme of Light and Dark—in all its nuances, contrasts, and in-between spaces. This open call seeks creative interpretations that push beyond the literal and embrace the complexity of duality, convergence, and transformation.
We asked artists to consider:
* The interplay of light and shadow: How light and dark coexist, influence each other, and create depth both visually and metaphorically.
* Liminal spaces between extremes: The transitions where light fades into darkness and vice versa, exploring uncertainty, ambiguity, and transformation.
* The grey areas of existence: Moving beyond stark dualities to examine how nothing is ever truly black or white, reflecting on moral, emotional, or conceptual ambiguities.
* Opposites interacting: The tension, harmony, or fusion between contrasting elements—hope and despair, clarity and obscurity, life and death.
* Emotional and symbolic weight: What does light signify? What does darkness hold? How do they shape narratives, moods, and perspectives in creative work?
* Metaphors of illumination and obscurity: Light as knowledge, revelation, or purity; darkness as mystery, the unknown, or the subconscious.
* The cyclical nature of light and dark: Exploring patterns of day and night, seasons, personal growth, and transformation through shifting contrasts.
Artist: Ali Mulroy
www.alimulroy.weebly.com
Selah. Description: I work figuratively and experimentally: continually drawn to light and dark as my focus. The internal narrative created through lighting is something I am eternally inspired by. A piece exploring the timeless qualities of the pause. Selah - a pause within a musical composition.
Artist: María X. Fernández
https://www.mariaxfernandez.com/
Description: A series of works based on Goethe's studies of the spectrum created at the boundary between light and darkness. These works, which follow Newton's theories, understand darkness not as the absence of light, but as an entity in its own right. In these experiments, I use lenses and moving figures.
Artist: Johannes Christopher Gerard
https://www.johannesgerard.com
Mystery Light. Description. To mention it right at the beginning: all three works I submitted contain and reflect autobiographical elements related to my struggle with mental disorders and problems. The first photographic work, titled "Mystery Light", shows a hallway that is mostly in darkness, only part of it is illuminated by a soft light whose source is unknown or at least not visible. A door at the end of the hallway is half open. The space behind the door, however, is covered in darkness. This is how I see the world around me and it is a symbol of my questions about where my tormented mind will lead me.
Artist: Neil Shrubb
https://www.saatchiart.com/en-gb/neilshrubb
View from the fire escape. Description: A mixed-media piece taken from photography in New York, this became a study of light and its cast shadow. Originally a drawing, layers of paint and pastel were built up, removed, re-applied, and varnished until I was happy with the tonal qualities, depth, and colour.
Artist: Marin Flora-Michèle
https://alexandrabouge.tumblr.com/
UNTITLED. Description. Marin Flora Michèle my mother made a series of photographs on homeless people. The whiteness of the sheet in which the homeless person is wrapped contrasts with the background made up of black, oppressive bars, which seem to sink into the body.
Artist: Nicholas Middleton
https://photo-analogue.blogspot.com/
Description: As with photography, on which it depends, the invention of cinema has many claimants; like photography, cinema was equally an idea whose time had simply arrived, largely as a result of other inventions, the most important being photographic emulsion applied to a flexible base - film. If the cinema is understood to be a communal, theatrical experience, with an audience watching a projected image from moving photographic film, the first demonstration of cinema belongs to the Lathams: Woodville and sons Otway and Grey. The Lathams are forgotten cinema pioneers, despite their first public projection in New York, May 1895, a footnote in cinema history due to the inferiority of their technology while the Lumière brothers are more popularly given credit for ‘inventing’ cinema when they projected their films before a paying audience in Paris, in December 1895. 'Swinging Light' is inspired by two distinct aspects of Lathams’ story, filmed on a single strip of 2x8mm film. The Lathams first tests were made in early 1895, filming a swinging light. Although not explicitly stated as a lightbulb, I would like to believe that, if it was, its use seems to be an unwitting reference to Thomas Alva Edison. Edison claimed to have invented the lightbulb, despite prior claims by Joseph Swan and others; Edison was resist to the idea of projecting films, and a couple of his employees moonlighted with the Lathams to work on projection. The Lathams are remembered today through the Latham loop, a slack piece of film either side of the gate to allow the continuous motion of the film through camera or projector to become intermittent at the point of filming or projection: this is visible in the right hand frame, showing film moving through a camera, against the swinging light on the left.
Artist name: Pryddywyrd
https://axisweb.org/artwork/pryddy-wyrd
Pryddywyrd is an ongoing project by Julian Claxton that started in 2023. Firmly based in its particular locale on the isolated, mysterious Mendip Plateau, the work moves between the representation of objects and events to the making of objects, working within tropes of folk, gothic and folk horror. The work is mainly seen through photographs posted on the Pryddywyrd Instagram account. These exist in the grey zone, approaching dusk with mist and fog ever present.
Bridie. Description: The burial of a treasured chicken, Bridie, laid to rest in a shallow grave, following a sudden death, now protected for her future journeys by a Saint Brigid cross, made from sedge growing in the field she lived in and a clay pot made from the mud she scratched in filled with corn. Still warm, she exists in a liminal space in this photograph recording the moment when the light of day still fell on her before her forever journey to the dark.
Artist: Philip Vaughan-Williams
Description: ‘Re-Write (The Dark Side and The Light Side)’ are pieces of work exploring narrative. At a point 50 years into the artist’s life, this is a reflective piece about the different paths and junctions in life that could have been taken year by year, whereby a life narrative could have been placed anywhere between the most positive and negative of experiences.
Artist: Philip Vaughan-Williams
The in-between. Description: 'The in-between' is a self-portrait of the artist. Tattoos represent the dark and the light sides of the artist, with a connecting line across the chest, detailing a life journey and highlighting the narrative of fluctuating mental health.
Artist: Richard Eveleigh
https://www.richardeveleighartist.com/
UK-based artist, Richard Eveleigh, has exhibited work across Europe and America. He has shown at the Truman Brewery, The Signal Gallery and the Mall Galleries. Richard regularly exhibits work at Ad Lib Gallery in Wimbledon Village and Artly Mix in São Paulo. Shortly after graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2011, Richard suffered a series of brain haemorrhages. His work is heavily influenced by this experience and his exploration of "duality" encapsulates this. While a traumatic and disruptive experience it is also a driving and motivating force behind his art.
Dawning. Description: The image "Dawning" captures an English village as the Sun rises on a misty morning. The scene forms part of my exploration into the conflicting nature of rural locations. It is both quaint and unsettling. The use of a monochromatic filter emphasises the more moody qualities of the foggy vista.