‘Every evening we unfold the light, and every morning, fold it back, to return the blue to the sky.’
The US artist James Turrell has made a career of manipulating light and space, creating ‘new worlds’ that force viewers to confront the fluidity and fallibility of their own visual perception. Born into a conservative Quaker family, Turrell got his start building meeting houses – quiet, simple structures where Quakers are meant to ‘greet the light’. James Turrell: You Who Look is a visual and verbal paean to the artist’s celebrated career, with an emphasis on Roden Crater near Flagstaff in Arizona, a ‘place between the Earth and the cosmos’, a ‘natural-light observatory’ built into an extinct volcano – a work that has been 45 years in the making and is still unfinished.
