‘One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star’
– Friedrich Nietzsche
‘This body of work explores light that emerges from chaos. The sculptures are born between storm and stillness’
– Talia Goldsmith
The green light on the jetty in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a symbol of deep longing. Lighthouses, more generally, are sentinels that protect seafarers from tempests. As for the Light Keeper – the keeper of the light? We long for protection and guidance, we trust the lone soul perched up on high, binoculars in hand, who can anticipate an unknown threat.
In the 'Salt' exhibition, Talia Goldsmith’s Light Keepers are sentient beings; sculptures designed to appease and console us. In a world as violent and fraught as ours, all the more do we need our guardians. An empath, first and foremost, Goldsmith understands sculpture to be a divining rod. A lodestone, a guide, song, map, thrum. Sculptures need not be mute. Her elongated narrow white forms, deliberately coarse-grained, unmoved by a glacial modern uniformity, are ocular. The glass mosaics transfer and transform light and make us realise their photosynthetic and healing power, without which we remain in darkness, unknowable to ourselves, unable to find ourselves, or be found by others. Light connects us, spirits us, transports us.
Conceived in groups, Goldsmith’s Light Keepers belong to a mysterious sect. It is mystery that is key, the belief that we cannot know those who truly protect us. And yet, we can intuit a divine congregation. We know that faith moves in inscrutable ways, that love without care is null. Perhaps we must all learn to become keepers of light.