Artwork The Day Breaks

Using a hand-made scanning apparatus built from salvaged enlarger lenses, plumbing supplies, a desktop scanner, and fibre-optic rods, The Day Breaks presents a time-lapse "photograph" of the changing light captured over the course of a day onto a single image plane in real time. I had already been thinking of producing an array of sorts to divide the sky into a series of aligned yet discrete sections, and the salvaged enlarger lenses were the perfect vehicle for this once I embedded them inside some ABS plumbing pipe. From there I needed a way to channel the gathered light into a flat plane and onto the surface of a desktop scanner, which was only possible with fibre-optic rods. The array, once completed, was mounted atop scaffolding two-storeys above the ground. Each scan was ganged side to side like fence boards in the order they were taken to make one continuous image. This image was then enlarged to match standard roll paper width (50"), the result being a large format response curve of the changing light intensity and colour of one full day.