Faraday Cage

Hiroshi Sugimoto works primarily in the medium of photography. He is a brilliant technician with a mastery of the 8 x 10” large-format camera, extremely long exposures and different ways of making images.

Faraday Cage (2010) is an installation specially conceived for the Power House on Cockatoo Island containing light boxes from his recent Lighting Fields series, and was presented for the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). The work is based on Sugimoto’s recent experiments photographically imaging static electricity on large-format film. Part medium, part scientist, Sugimoto is both recorder and facilitator of the process in which evanescent tendrils of forked ‘lightning’ manifest a fundamental natural relationship between light, energy, power, and the dawn of life itself. Spectators will view the glowing images held aloft on a series of stage-like platforms; and at the end of their ascent through the space they are faced, high on an ancient wooden pole, by a thirteenth-century Japanese sculpture of Raijin, the God of Thunder.