Wrapped Flowers" by early holography artist Margaret Benyon. Image courtesy Jonathan Ross Gallery.
Since the invention of the laser made holography possible in the late 1960s, the artistic possibilities of the medium took off. Among the artists and physicists drawn to experiment with the aesthetics of holography were an inordinate number of women. Those early years were a golden age of collaboration between scientists and artists, and HoloWire focuses on a handful of these women artists who led the way. You can learn more about two other pioneering holographic artists who we featured previously in our HoloWire articles, “Portrait of a Holographer - Anait (1922-1998),” and “Artist Profile: Linda Law.”
In Australia, Paula Dawson finagled her way into a physics course where they were teaching holography and exhibited her first artwork at a student show in 1974. That led to her being invited to collaborate with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Laboratory (CSIRO) in Sydney, where her “Transparent Things,” got a solo show in 1977. “[CSIRO] was very welcoming to me,” she recalls. “I didn’t have the technical know-how, but I was learning all the stages of how to make holograms.”
Her next significant collaboration was at the Laboratoire de Physique Generale et d’Optique in France, which, in late 1979, had created what was then the world’s largest hologram, of Venus de Milo in the Louvre. There Dawson met and collaborated with holographer Nicole Aebischer who, she says, taught her technical tricks, including ensuring the use of an optical table to isolate the object from vibration. “They had an entire lab made for vibration isolation through the floor, so you were walking on a 30-meter optical table,” she recalls. “And the lasers were so powerful and had such huge coherence lengths that they could handle meters, not inches.”
She worked closely with Aebischer on several large-scale holographic installations. Dawson returned to Australia but came back to that lab in 1980 to create her own room-sized installation, “No Place Like Home,” a section of a typical Australian suburban home. “If you peered inside the window, you could see a totally furnished living room with a TV showing ads,” she says. “But when you went inside the house, the same window was blank, with nothing in it. That’s the experience I wanted people to have.” That work toured widely through Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Tokyo.
Later, Dawson spent time at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Spatial Imaging Group of Media Lab, where her Ph.D. work was co-supervised by Stephen Benton. “It was a privilege to work there with so many artists,” she says. “I would bring problems to Stephen every week and we’d work through it.” She took those plans to a lab in Austin, Texas run by Benton’s former students. “I also moved into more digital holography, collaborating with computer graphic artists to make the content,” says Dawson, who cites “Shadowy Figures” and “Luminous Presence” as two such projects.
Claudette Abrams also got her start as a holographic artist in the 1970s, when she was inspired by the exhibition “Visual Alchemy” at the Hamilton Art Gallery. “It was a real lightbulb moment,” she recalls. “I was thinking about sculpture and was already into photography, and holography was a marriage of both interests.” In the late 1970s, she took the only holography course at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. “Holography taught me about light, space, dimension – everything related to sculpture,” she says. “The sense of presence was what I loved the most about sculpture, and holography had a very similar vibe.”
Abrams developed larger themes for her holographic pieces on human behavior and psychology and integrated found objects to create an immersive space. Her installation “Personal Effects” was a series of holographic fish tanks – with real fish swimming in them – that were over six-feet tall and four feet wide. “I projected holographic scenes into the water, which were deeper than the water, creating levels of dimension that played with each other,” she says. To produce large holographs, she collaborated with astrophysicist/holographer Dr. John Perry, at Holographics North in Vermont.
“It was the era of New Media with video artists, immersive installations, sometimes with holography and interactive elements” she says. “I was interested in developing those spaces. I didn’t want to do a flat square frame on the wall, like a painting.” She next focused on holography/mixed-media installations of animals in multiple works. “I had flying and perched birds in real cages and behind chicken wire so it was a mixed media of holography showing the virtual space in relation to tactile media,” she says.
One of her largest bodies of work was “Reproduction,” which played on such topics as livestock animals being bred for human consumption, as well as referencing replication media. For this project, which took almost a year to do, she developed in full color, and created a painstaking 12-step process that resulted in great realism. “We had to build the camera from scratch which would comprise an entire room,” she says. “We did a lot of testing to get the effect I wanted.” Holography, she added, is “not an easy medium to work in.” But, adds Abrams, “I haven’t stopped thinking in holographic terms. Once you have that sensibility, it carries through.”
Pearl John saw her first hologram when she was a teenager at The Light Fantastic, a London holography gallery. “It was a magic trick – a hand holding an egg that disappeared as you passed by,” she says. “I just fell in love with the medium.” After doing a short workshop in holography at that gallery, she got a job there and fell in with the community of holography pioneers. “I was welcomed into the fold,” she says.
She interviewed early holography artist Margaret Benyon for a pre-university course, worked as an assistant to other holographers, and completed a Masters degree in holography at the Royal College of Arts (RCA) in 1992. “There was an emphasis on technical perfection there and I really enjoyed subverting that,” she says. At the RCA lab, she took advantage of its powerful Ruby pulsed laser to create portraits of people behind glass of varying thickness. “The image ripples,” she says. “I was more interested in capturing movement and portraying emotional content than producing a stylish studio portrait as I had been taught.”
Early on in her career, John created shadowgrams, also known as one-step holograms, in which a holographic image was created by passing an expanded laser beam through a ground glass screen with an overlaid mask created for the object onto holographic film. “You can produce multiple exposures and change the color and the position of the image behind the glass,” she says. “I enjoy controlling the space within the image and that having a meaning.” In her more recent work for her doctorate, John has used space to indicate that the farther back in the holographic space, the further back the image is in time.
“Although I’ve made a digital animated hologram my first love in analog,” she says. “I learned a skill so, for me it’s more like a craft than something highly technical. I’m more interested in the image than the technology.”
“Holographic art is a very rare and precious thing,” she adds. “I’m still quite happy to use a craft that I learned in the 1990s as long as it gives me the ability to make the images I want. When that no longer serves a purpose, I’ll have to learn a new technology.” Her work is currently exhibited at Gallery 286 in London, HoloCenter in New York, and Ciudad Real in Spain.
Sydney Koke has a unique perspective on holographic artists, as an interdisciplinary artist and a curator of holographic art. With a formal education in neuroscience, she then immersed herself in art, earning a Masters’ degree in 2013. She gravitated to holography to create sculptures that changed as the viewer moved around them. “I realized it was possible to use holography as a medium for contemporary art,” she says.
She also met members of the established holography community and became enamored of the pioneering work in the field, such as Harriet Casdin-Silver’s 1991 “Venus of Willendorf,” a holographic take on the iconic Paleolithic fertility symbol as well as the work of Susan Cowles. Koke also sought out collections of holographic art, one of the biggest being the Jonathan Ross collection in London, and basked in the synergies of artists and scientists at the International Symposium for Display Holography.
Koke said her mission has become to increase awareness of holography, improve access to exhibitions and encourage artists to consider holography as a medium. To that end, she has curated two shows of holographic art at Jonathan Ross’ Gallery 286, the most recent of which focuses on contemporary art holograms from the early 1990s. “With the vivid reds, greens, black and prominent geometries, these landmark pieces helped form the aesthetics of what people imagine when they think about holographic art,” she says.
She notes that the art highlighted in this show was made around 1991, the year that the Internet was introduced. “It was a pre-internet idea of a virtual space that we could potentially share,” she says. “I can’t help but imagine that this early holographic art inspired the idea of what would become cyberspace by exploring fundamental psychological properties of color and shape, the relationship between geometry and spirituality.”
“Art and science are both creative human endeavors that allow us to communicate with other people and understand our world,” she says, noting the natural synergies of the two fields. “We increasingly exist between the real world and an ever-more powerful virtual world of our creation, cyberspace. I think holography can function as a metaphor for the experience of being alive today, and I look forward to seeing more artists learn the medium and participate in this incredible history.”