A Roar, A Boar y Alice

A Roar, A Boar y Alice LED light sculpture by Lumencrafter. Art by Reid Dennison.

Large, blue LED light sculpture is made using polycarbonate. The light weight of this art allows this to be installed easily.

Photograph shows the A Roar, A Boar y Alice light sculpture outside a barn in daylight. For more information about Lumencrafter art, the A Roar, A Boar y Alice light sculpture, and commissioning your bespoke LED light sculpture, contact us.

Reid’s Story

As much as a teenager can be serious about these things, I wanted to be a sculptor.  I liked art, especially 3D art.  I changed schools to get into an art program.  It was the 70’s, I had long hair, I didn’t do my homework.  But my mother encouraged me.  From time to time, invarious art classes or doing crafts with my family, I’d make something I’d like and keep.  I still have a piece of fired clay that took an impression of my grasp – and a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, says the poet.

I always enjoyed looking at things in that way—abstract but with a connection to the natural world.  The idea that kept coming back:  a human structure with a natural metaphor.

I can’t think of a time when artists were not in my life.  My mother was a painter; one sister, a skilled pianist and flautist; another acted at Stratford and Shaw and in various films for television.  For 29 years, I lived in Arcadia Housing Co-op for Artists on Toronto harbour,alongside many fine Canadian painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, and actors.  The move from Toronto to Flesherton was encouraged by a painter friend and her gallery-owning husband.  They had seen the light sculptures and offered me a place to show my work.

I was losing the joy of film editing; I had loved the touch of celluloid, the look of light and dark on that narrow plastic strip; had loved the cutting and taping, the physicality of it.  To stay alive in that business, I had to reinvent myself several times, learning linear videotape editing and then digital computer editing.  But as I got further and further away from working with my hands, I felt something was lost.  And then, the new television aesthetic – the pressure to add vwoom sounds and fwoosh flashes to every other cut just because we can – all just made my soul heavy.

In one of my frequent home renovations, I used polycarbonate twinwall to create Japanese-style paneled room dividers.  I had one very narrow strip of the polycarbonate, a very slender trim from one of the panels.  I liked the way that looked, a delicate ladder.  I began to play.

I found myself cutting up polycarbonate plastic strips and twisting them into shapes enfolding light.  It was time to become the sculptor my boyhood self had imagined.

Now I was working, not with projected light, but with direct-source light.   It’s similar – as a film student studying cinematography, I had to consider what to put in the frame, what the dark spaces were telling me.  I turn much the same eye upon my sculptures.  And I’m still working in a darkened room.