Devin Sula
Artist Statement
Website: devinsula.com
My upbringing in a multicultural household, combined with frequent moves across vastly different regions, from Central America to South Asia to the Middle East, has continually reshaped my perspective. These formative experiences cultivated a deep curiosity about how we negotiate space and its boundaries, the translation process innate to all communication, and the tools we use to mediate both.
My work centers on reimagining spatial interactions. I focus primarily on the relationship between glass, light, and space, exploring how light, when manipulated through glass, can intervene in and transform spatial environments. I see light as a nomadic entity: alive, dynamic, and vital. It breathes life into space and becomes the medium through which we engage with our surroundings. In this way, light functions as a spatial interstitium: a connective tissue that holds the world’s form together. Our sensing bodies are crucial to this navigation, translating the raw data of space into a felt understanding of place.
I create things meant to be situated within. The sensing body is a remarkable interlocutor with space, experiencing holistically; seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and knowing, all at once. When the body is compelled to move and adjust to access a space, it initiates a somatic dialogue with the environment. This interaction can momentarily quiet the thinking mind, allowing the body to explore, play, and encounter new dimensions of a space, familiar or otherwise.
Link to video work of installation
Click on image to enlarge.
Artworks
A2B, 2024. Landscaping paper, sunlight, encoded poem. [2.5' x 6' (x7)]
A poem written on site, translated into ASCII and hand-cut out of landscaping paper, sized to each window panel. Installed in an old greenhouse at the CU Mountain Research Station.
Light Scopes, 2024. Steel, glass, vinyl, borrowed trees. [38”, 48”, 56”]
Steel scopes fabricated to specific heights of my own body are independently focused on three different trees located in the courtyard outside the CU Visual Arts Center. Each scope is oriented through a square of coloured vinyl, creating lenses that can only be properly seen through adherence to a series of interactions.
Spatial Study in Blue (I & II), 2024. Glass, copper, lead, steel, light, 20 seconds of encoded music. [22" x 22"]
Light functions as invisible matter. It can be cast into space, used to paint and fill a room. Natural light passing through organic materials creates one image, while electric light filtered through synthetic materials creates another. Space is dependent on light; it shapes the orientation and contortion of the body in a room, informs our understanding of space as a container, and influences the way we experience the presence of others.
This glass membrane is activated by viewer engagement. When a flashlight shines through the piece, projections of moving refractions are cast into space, and coat the room in a mural of light. A score is embedded into the glass grid design, leaving only the visual remnants of a lost Sound.
Single Point Scope, 2024. Bronze, silver solder. [12" at full extension, 6" collapsed]
A viewing device designed with a singular pinhole to isolate a lone star, eyeball, screw, keyhole, room number, or whatever else falls into the user's focus. The form and collapsing mechanisms are smithed and soldered by hand from a large sheet of bronze.
Redshifted, 2025. Glass, lead, cable, steel, aluminum, LED lights, motor, wire, motion sensors. [23” x 14” (glass)] [60” (steel post)]
Whether celestial or synthesized, light has long been a vital element in human navigation and way-finding. The human body relates to light practically and mystically, using its properties to explore both internal and external landscapes.
This work draws inspiration from the unique structure of the Fresnel lens—a revolutionary development that enabled lighthouses to focus and magnify light, projecting across vast distances and dense atmospheres.
Light functions as a connective tissue, giving shape and definition to space, the medium through which all interaction occurs. Here, red light is cast into space, perpetually in motion between source and projection.
