Objects of Light: Impacts of Artificial Night Lighting
It’s just a light switch.
Of all the objects in the Powerhouse Collection, why this simple switch?
There are other light switches, but this is the one I was drawn to. You can see worn down paint across 2 tones: the brittle, plastic-like bakelite is dark brown, like the skin of an eel, with another light coming from somewhere else, reflecting off its shiny surface. The porcelain base is off-white with a few specks of brown, like the eggshell of an Eastern Rosella. And it is dome-shaped, like the dome of the Sydney Observatory, where in the staff quarters, I saw a cross-stitch that said, ‘DOME SWEET DOME’.
In an Observatory setting, the dome shape allows protected access to the sky, shielding sensitive telescopes from the elements during viewing times. In an old switch like this, the dome shape provides tactile feedback, a click of confirmation.
When did the moon become not enough?
Each of my objects is constructed from minerals, earth, and animal. Leather, porcelain, metal. I have tried throughout this research residency to pinpoint when light is no longer considered natural and becomes instead artificial. I find, like most things, that line is more blurry than I originally thought. We took fire from the friction of a stick to the drippings of animal fat and tallow, to filaments in glass made of sand, to circuits humming behind walls built of stone, to the cold, blue pulse of LEDs, and in 2026, we have satellites stitching brightness across the sky.
Everything changes shape eventually, and, like an egg, morphs into something else.
Sometimes the most simple objects can be the most compelling and can say so much. When I began this project, I wanted to explore how we became so dependent on artificial light, how it became so insidious to the point that 80% of the world’s population lives with light pollution. It causes insects that navigate by celestial light, like bogong moths and monarch butterflies, to become disoriented and exhausted. It confuses newly hatched sea turtles by disrupting their instinctive urge to crawl towards the horizon, sending them inland to their death instead. It increases the likelihood of certain cancers and cardiovascular disease in humans. Each year, millions of birds die after slamming into brightly lit buildings.
The light switch, for me, was a way to explore this materiality, to consider how I could render something as intangible as light in my prose. This switch invited reflection on my own relationship — and therefore complicity — with artificial light. The switch acts as a conduit between the body and the light that streams out.
We treat museum artefacts as fragile and valuable. We handle them with gloved hands, take notes only in pencil, and examine them under the supervision of trained curators, or else risk breakage. Because if they were to break, knowledge would be lost.
I wish to reframe darkness as fragile, and valuable. Darkness too holds knowledge, stories, cartographies, and messages.
While thinking of the switch in ovoid terms — and of domes, mothering, and light — I read that human babies develop their circadian rhythms in the womb, and songbirds, like the Eastern Rosella, learn vocals from inside the egg. It's the absence of light that makes bird eggs creamy like porcelain. For birds who keep their eggs in burrows, or deep in nests away from the sun, the UV-protecting pigment is not necessary, and so the shell stays pale.
An egg, like the switch, can seem small and insignificant. But it represents the beginning of something: in the 1930s, switches like this appeared in homes around the world during the great expansion of domestic electrification.
After my viewing of this object, the switch will go back into its box, and back into the Powerhouse Collection, away from the sun. Such absence of light will preserve objects like this switch for many more years to come. In my year of writing with objects of light and caring for babies in the dark, I have learned to think of darkness not as a void to fill, but a generative, restorative and active realm of its own, full of animal activity, botanical growth, intimate exchanges, cellular repair and physiological shifts.
Why the switch? While cycles, seasons, time and rhythms used to belong to the atmosphere, the switch is an example of what it looked like when we got the ability to control the light — and a reminder that we still have the power.
