How to bring the sky inside?  Mavis is illuminated solely by light captured from the Harwood Museums' high north-facing windows and shifts with the changing light of the sky throughout the day.

Entering through a tunnel into an interior chamber lined with handmade cast glass pieces lit solely by light from the sky, up to 6 people at a time are invited to lie on beanbag chairs and look upward as light slowly shifts in this dusky twilight light environment.

The process of building the piece involved building a modular inner chamber—a plywood room that can be disassembled and reassembled on site—and then casting the glass by hand at my studio in Taos before moving the chamber to the Harwood Museum. At the Museum the leaning sheetrock walls were built around the inner chamber to capture light from the windows. There is no electric light in the piece.

Mavis is my largest indoor light work to date. This was my first experience making a scale model and drawings of an architectural space this large, and it was exciting to see my small model come to life. I used old-school graph paper, pencils, and foam core.

For the last decade I've been building light sculptures to be installed in the remote landscape that are illuminated directly by the sky, the sun and moon. These land and sky-based works are where my heart resides.  So when asked to build a piece inside the Harwood Museum the question was, how to bring the sky inside?