Moonlit Aurora , Southern Tasmania, 2023

After having recently located to Southern Tasmania, I have taken up Aurora Photography. I will never forget the first time I managed to capture a slight Aurora or Southern light, on camera or the time that I saw the moving curtains and beams with my naked eye.

The facts are that our eyes do not pick up that many colours at nighttime, and sometimes when the Aurora is not very strong, you need a camera set to long exposure, to actually capture the lights.

It can be daunting heading out at night in a place that you are not familiar with and the first handful of times I did have a family member come out with me. As it was often for hours on end and most of the time they could not see any aurora, as it was only enough to see on camera, they got bored and refused to come after a while.

These days I try to scout out possible good places in the daytime, so I have a little bit of an idea of what they place looks like and what I can expect to encounter.

Being out there alone in the dark is a full body experience, so to speak. The Tasmanian bush come alive after dark, so you often hear possums hissing, wallabies thumping along or the special Tasmanian Turbo chook – calling. All this mixed with the occasional bio-luminescence – where the water comes alive with blue sparkles, fish swimming can be seen as they create a blue trail behind them and then there is the aurora – the changing colours, with bursts of energy and high columns reaching far into the sky above, curtains of varying colour dancing across the horizon. 

Sometimes its windy, and the clouds seems to fly across the sky, other times, its so still that the waters surface becomes a mirror. The moon adds an extra challenge , but moonlit auroras can be quite beautiful, that is if the aurora is strong enough to overcome the light of the moon.

How can you capture that experience in order to convey it to someone who has never been fortunate enough to have such an experience,-  that was the next challenge.

I based the sculptures on the basic Scherk template, and added colours, extended it in parts, or used multiple templates to try and convey different experiences.

A few of the images that inspired me to do the first of the aurora sculptures.

The next sculpture I made I wanted to try and express the huge amount of energy, the colours and the spikes or columns that often appear during the aurora.

Here are a few of the images that inspired me to make the next sculpture.

And here is the Sculpture, again based around the two holed Scherk, but obviously modified.

The next sculpture I made was a blue and green multiple resist sculpture.  This sculpture was a finalist in the Australian Fibre award 2023 and was exhibited in Sydney, with 24 other finalists, aptly named; The Spell of Aurora.

It is an interpretation of the night where the following image was taken.

Green Aurora, Southern Tasmania, 2023