Monica Sand

Since 1992 Monica Sand has worked to give an artistic interpretations of research in physics. She has co- operated with scientists at CERN, Geneva and in Sweden. In her art she uses materials and detectors especially made for experiments in elementary particle physics. She sometimes works with dancers, poets and composers.

Monica Sand's work.

Maxwell's Field
An area, a context, a mission.

I wanted to collect light the way a biologist collects species. I also wanted to collect the absence of light; shadows and darkness. All this with one single question in the back of my mind; what is light? I wanted to collect different aspects of light, light as information, as orientation in space and time, as traces, as passages.

I wanted to collect light, travel to different places and trap whatever light there was into a can, put the lid on and go home. I wanted to put the cans of light on a shelf, put labels on them indicating where the light was found, at what time and how. At CERN I found materials which collect and guide light. Materials created to collect light and measure its energy. So I could start collecting light.

Maxwell's Field is the site which grows out of my collection of light. Thirty white boxes, containing light and absence of light build up the field. Different groups which cluster around a theme. Each theme consists of a material, together the themes create Maxwell's Field. Each box is its own area; the parts and the whole compose the field. In order to create a picture of the riddle Maxwell solved, I have entered a field, which might be a quagmire; an uncertainty, a complicity, a riddle with its clues. Is there an answer; what is light?

Physics gives me new tools to describe the place, which has to be described. The place is in between, with stillness like before a storm, or after. Hovering over the place there is a tone which repeats itself, like a faint but tangible memory. The tone is short and intensive, and consists of the sound of millions of protons being dumped into a block of copper.

Most of the light collecting materials comes from different experiments at CERN. The materials I have used in my boxes are lead-glass from OPAL (at LEP), scintillators and wave-length shifting fibres from ATLAS (at LHC), clear fibres from the RD1/SPACAL project and small light guides from an earlier experiment, nobody remembers which anymore. I have utilised Silica aerogel from Airglass in Lund (originally invented at CERN) and black glass from a German manufacturer (the material is actually used in experiments to stop light from passing through, but it could only be found in very small pieces). The common property of all these materials is that they all capture and guide the light. And all, except the black glass, are transparent.
Maxwell's Field is the contrast between the rough surface, the repetition, the disorder, which is your first impression when you enter the field, and the partially hidden content which reveals each box as a field in its own right. The mathematical, the simple and the complex are hidden in the world you are invited to contemplate.

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