Last August, I was fortunate to participate in a two-week course on architecture and the human sciences sponsored by the Moving Boundaries Collaborative. Our venues were Stockholm, Sweden, and Helsinki, Finland. Nordic X, as this session was called, was particularly rich, as the theme was “Light in Architecture and the Design of Lighting for Human Wellbeing.” Course chairs Kurt Hunker, president and chief design officer of ANFA Architect, and Katharina Wulff, professor of chronobiology at Sweden’s Umeå University, headed a distinguished faculty of more than 25 experts from throughout the world. I joined the faculty for the third time in four courses over the past several years.

Several faculty taught lighting design at Swedish design schools, and two were particularly expert on the work of the American artist James Turrell. Johanna Enger of Konstfack and Uta Besenecker of K.T.H. in Stockholm introduced students to concepts employed by Turrell in their lectures before the entire group traveled on the sixth day to Yitterjarna, outside Stockholm. There, we were able to experience one of the artist’s early “skyspaces” near the Steiner Community at twilight. The long evening hours at this northern latitude gave us ample time to experience Turrell’s spellbinding work.

Sitting for about 45 minutes in the cylindrical space, about 20 of us saw and felt the light change in both intensity and color. Though the sky began as blue and the dome a light yellow-orange, the central circle and its domed surround gradually transformed into more vivid and arresting colors. Amazingly, the initial warm-cool contrast became warmer, revealing a blazing sky against an almost green background, then turned cooler into a pink and, later, purple glow. Some light appeared to come from the lower walls and some from above the circular aperture, but no one was aware how the color shifts were creating what we perceived. There were, we knew, some very smart scientists in the group, and they seemed just as awestruck as the rest of us. 

Anyone familiar with the visual system understands that color perception is one of the mysteries of human awareness. Scientists and philosophers have studied the phenomenology of color for decades and yet have reached little agreement on how the brain and body apprehend and understand different hues in varying conditions of light and darkness. It is therefore astounding that an artist who works only with natural and artificial light as his media has been so successful at dazzling his audiences in such a wide variety of installations throughout his career, which began in the late 1960s. His training in psychology gave him the knowledge to experiment with mixing natural and artificial light after first studying with Robert Irwin, a light artist in Los Angeles. Though his first works were mainly in galleries, Turrell ventured outdoors in the 1970sm and began to create “skyspaces.” During the dawn and twilight hours, it is possible to manipulate the perception of skylight using colored artificial light around the borders of an aperture. This is how Turrell achieves his incredible, almost mystical effects. Like any good magician, he does not divulge his secrets to the public.

Turrell is a lifelong Quaker… His work is motivated not only by curiosity and ambition, but also by a spiritual quest. Quakers live by a search for “the inner light” and seek to understand its presence in fellow humans and all living things.

Turrell is a lifelong Quaker, as am I, so I am aware that his work is motivated not only by curiosity and ambition, but also by a spiritual quest. Quakers live by a search for “the inner light” and seek to understand its presence in fellow humans and all living things. In two installations—Live Oak Friends Meeting, in Houston, and Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting, in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania—Turrell used his knowledge to enrich the worship experiences of his fellow Quakers. (I have been fortunate to visit both spaces.)

Turrell has consistently lived his Quaker faith and inclinations. While an art student at the University of California at Irvine in 1966, he was arrested for teaching fellow students how to avoid the draft. (During Vietnam, many young men and women were drawn to Quakerism after first refusing to fight in that conflict.) After spending a year in prison in solitary, where he experienced light only in darkness, Turrell emerged with a burning ambition. He would use light to move his fellow human beings, to create beauty, and to combine science with art. Shortly after selling his first small pieces, he received a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to survey sites in the southwest for possible earth art in the tradition of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. In 1974, Turrell came upon what is known as the Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert. His journey toward finding the spirit of the place began then and there.

At age 81, after many successful one-man installations and retrospective shows in museums throughout the world, Turrell could quite easily rest on his laurels. As both a spiritual man and a patient searcher, he has continued to work on the crater project despite setbacks and financial challenges. He recently partnered with Kanye West and the University of Arizona to build a hotel and visitor center at the Roden Crater, allowing those with financial means to experience some of the site’s wonders, while others remain under construction. (One of the tunnels Turrell is building won’t operate as intended for another 2,000 years!)

Turrell is driven by more than an obsession with light; he has a truly cosmic sense of the universe and a spiritual understanding of how art can transcend the current moment.

This degree of patience and vision isn’t common, but it would not suffice to explain it as a purely “creative eccentricity.” Turrell is driven by more than an obsession with light; he has a truly cosmic sense of the universe and a spiritual understanding of how art can transcend the current moment. One feels it in his skyspaces and smaller gallery installations. One hears it in his voice as he describes the process of creating works. One understands the spiritual dimension while worshiping in one of his Quaker meeting rooms. 

Like the ancient people who built astrological monuments following the sun and stars, endowing them with characteristics associated with their deities, Turrell is fully in tune with things that can’t be explained by science or rational thinking. He works with light in order to discover the noblest and most profound qualities in humanity—to find those things that unite us with the wider world, the universe, and whatever spirit we follow to nourish our souls. 

Featured image: Ytterjärna Skyspace, Sweden. Photo by the author.