Chris Wood

For Chris Wood, her canvas is glass and her medium is light. She uses one to manipulate the other, with subtle interventions carefully placed in the optical plane. She harnesses patterns of light, which recall ephemeral glimpsed moments in the natural world. As glass is used more and more predominately as a sheeted shield, it is perceived as a material that excludes the majority of people from huge corporate buildings or as a functional piece of tableware that we unthinkingly use everyday. Chris is interested in restoring the lyrical properties of glass and its ability to captivate. Her sculptures are simple arrangements of optically coated glass called dichroic, which was originally developed by the NASA space agency. Dichroic is a colourless material that filters and reflects wavelengths of light producing a huge variety of rainbow coloured shadows and projections. The intricate pattern arrangements create reflected and refracted coloured light across the aluminum plane. After studying Furniture Design at Middlesex University in the mid 80s Chris went on to study glass at the Royal College of Art, where she worked on architectural scale projects dealing with light and space. Chris produces innovative installations for gallery exhibitions and has shown extensively throughout the UK and internationally. Her work is represented in a number of private collections as well as the Shanghai Museum of Glass.