Colleen DaRosa

I use a variety of media in colour layering compositions that capture, transform and screen light so that the works are best experienced as gradual encounters with variations in light.

My latest series of works in encaustic, plexiglas and with paper offer a palpable experience of light at play. 

The Light Blooms paintings highlight the transluscence and lustrous quality of the encaustic medium.

My plexiglas sculptures, the Light Floats, exhibit radiant surfaces glowing spaces and flashing edges. Lustrous reflections and variation in transparency and opacity refract and confound light's pathways. At night, these works operate as glowing objects of dynamic colour when lit by LED lights.

My light box series, Light Confections, are installed above The Coffee Grinder (in Byron Bay’s Lateen laneway parallel to Lawson St.). The ‘Light Pools’ series, which forms part of this new series, relates to a similar thematic. Here the Light Pools series seeks to amplify the presence of ambient light with pools of colour created within layers of saturated paper in sculptural relief.

The motifs and architectonic devices I use echo the way in which the glow of light and natural forms seep into the fabric of Nordic design and architecture. A reminiscence of several summers I spent in Scandinavia in which the difference in light from my home in northern NSW surprised me with its cloaking, softening and screening.

Artists, designers and architects in neo-minimalist and modernist genres have offered her the greatest intrigue and inspiration... including Olafur Elliasson, Alvar Aalto and Christian Haub as well as antipodeans Marion Borgelt and Gemma Smith.