Balloons as a base

I wanted the inspiration of a little colored light, like some abstract stained glass to hang in the window of my office, the visual equivalent of a wind chime.

I thought it might be fun to make, but first I had to learn about light. How does green light work its magic? What do crystals create when they split the light into rainbows?

My wife has many beads from back in the day when she made jewelry, cool beads of colored glass, little pendants. I thought I might string together a bunch of them and see what it looks like when the sunlight cuts through them.

She has a little sculpture of twisted wire of the hand of Fatimah. (there is great overlap in the attribution of miracles). So why not dangle strands of colored beads from the fingers?

We selected five things that matter most to us in our live: places, people, concepts. We named their aspects as we culled beads. Then I sequenced them into stories. Each strand tells one story. She tied them off and I hung them from the finger tips.

Perhaps it is not much to look at. It is meant after all, to be activated by the sun. It’s stories will be told at a certain time, in a certain place, when the sun cuts through it.

This has not yet happened. I discovered that I don’t get direct sunlight through my office window after the Spring equinox. It’ll likely be Fall before it will work in my room.

Yesterday was a very sunny day and I heard the neighbor’s wind chime and thought I might take the hand outside. It clouded up as soon as I did.

Once, my stepson and I scattered CDs around the dining room floor and through the last daylight into corners that had never seen it. Arcs and circles of various colors met and cycled in strange orbits for an hour or so.

I thought the hand would work like that, like a strange chandelier. So far, it has not. It is just a rather garish thing that sits on my desk, impervious to whatever small light I throw at it. I won’t know what it does for six months.