Eco-Illuminessence: A Sensory Crossing

📸 A Living Work in Progress

Eco-Illuminessence: A Sensory Crossing is a cross-disciplinary body of work developed between 2024 and 2025, marking the artist’s first foray into performance. Rooted in her visual installation practice, this evolving series bridges sculptural form and live gesture—inviting audiences into a world of low-tech enchantment and quiet storytelling through light, shadow, and movement.

Presented through two in-person showings and three livestreamed sessions—including a hybrid event at Xchanges Gallery (Victoria, BC)—this early iteration served as both a public offering and a developmental sketch. It became a space of experimentation, reflection, and transformation.

✦ Eco-Illuminessence: The Visual Core

The term Eco-Illuminessence refers to the installation’s sculptural foundation: a collection of lantern-assemblies and a large-scale sumi-e curtain. These visual elements—crafted from salvaged fabric, translucent materials, and ink-marked rice paper—formed the poetic architecture of the space. Installed as a visual art exhibition, they evoked themes of ecological imagination, interspecies kinship, and material storytelling.

✦ A Sensory Crossing: The Performative Layer

In performance, the fabric lantern sculptures became puppet-characters—animated not through traditional puppetry, but through light manipulation, shadow play, and direct interaction. The artist used handheld lights and live cameras to mobilize the shadows of these forms, transforming static objects into living silhouettes.

A live camera pointed at a flat, illuminated surface allowed the artist to paint directly with sumi-e ink. This surface functioned as both a projection canvas and a performance space. The live feed was projected onto surrounding surfaces, creating a layered visual field. Participants were invited to co-create scenes through movement, layering, and light.

This improvisational layer—a sensory crossing—allowed the visual art to speak back, poetically, through gesture and ephemeral choreography. It marked a turning point in the artist’s practice: a conversation between stillness and motion, installation and performance, object and presence.

🎞️ Highlights in Motion

Below are brief clips capturing moments of improvisation and light-play. Full video below.

✦ From Ink to Lantern: 2D-to-3D Sumi-e Transformation

As the performance practice deepened, the artist began to ask: What if a sumi-e brushstroke could become a sculptural form? What if a shadow could be folded into a lantern?

This question sparked a new direction in the work: transforming 2D sumi-e ink gestures into 3D lantern structures. Brushstrokes once confined to paper were reimagined as translucent forms—curved, stitched, and suspended. The sumi-e curtain became not just a projection surface, but a sculptural archive of movement and memory.

This bi-directional crossing—between drawing and object, between shadow and form—continues to shape the artist’s evolving language of visual poetics.

Diagram: From sumi-e brushstroke to sculptural lantern form

✦ Returning to Non-Verbal Roots

While the artist briefly explored audio effects, spoken word, and live music performance during this phase, the process ultimately reaffirmed her commitment to non-verbal, sensory-rooted expression. As a hard-of-hearing artist, she chose to center visual poetics, tactile interaction, and embodied storytelling in the next cycle of development—creating work that is accessible without language or sound.

✨ Descriptive Details & Photo Captions

🐇 Rabbit Mother Lantern with Umbrella

Installed fabric sculpture of a rabbit mother holding an umbrella. She stands as a gentle presence—part guardian, part storyteller—whose silent silhouette flickers across the space in folds of light.

🖌️ Live Sumi-e Ink Painting on Projection Surface

The artist paints directly onto rice paper laid over a lit surface. Each brushstroke becomes part of the performance—projected in real time and interacting with lantern characters and props.

🐟 Small Lantern Figures in Motion

Handheld lantern creatures glide across the space. Animated by internal light and the shadows they cast, they suggest multispecies kinship in a dance of silhouettes.

✋ Interactive Play with Light and Surface

Participants co-create scenes by moving light sources, draping fabric, and layering paper. Every gesture adds to an evolving light story that invites touch, presence, and care.

🖋️ Shadow-Texture Poem

Cut-outs, sumi-e ink paintings, and marked transparencies shift between motion and stillness. They form a layered visual poem of natural elements and quiet reflection—accessible without sound or language.

🔍 Explore the Installation Up Close

Click a tag below to explore selected glimpses from Eco-Illum’s creative evolution.

📺 Full Performance Recording

Watch the full improvised light projection play recorded at Xchanges Gallery (June 15, 2025).