The Rainbow Connection
Peter Erskine’s art taps into the healing power of light and shade.
By Keith Bush
Colors arc along a curved wall, slowly and steadily moving across the expanse of white. Outside, bright hues appear in shadows cast on walkways, benches and desert plants.
Visitors to the Eisenhower Lucy Curci Cancer Center usually come with serious, stressful matters on their minds, not planning to participate in a work of modern art. But if these splashes of color brighten their moods for a moment, if the effect of refracted sunlight takes them briefly out of their problems and into a natural world of health and beauty, they serve their purpose.
That’s the intention of Peter Erskine, a sculptor who works in the powerful yet ethereal medium of natural light. He’s fond of quoting Jonas Salk, M.D., inventor of the first safe and effective polio vaccine: “The rainbow is a very deep memory for humans. It has been coded into our genetic material over millions of years. Seeing a rainbow restores our connection to nature. It restores our physical and psychic functions.”
For the artist, the scientist’s statement echoes wisdom encapsulated in ancient folklore and religion. The Norse saw the rainbow as a bridge between one plane of existence and another. The Old Testament offers it as a symbol of survival and promise of safety.
Getting Personal
As a sculptor, Erskine has long been fascinated by the interplay of light, space and matter. He created “Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations,” which premiered in 1992 in the Roman Forum, casting huge splashes of color against ancient stone buildings.“That was about the environment: the beauty and dangers of sunlight, the beauty of the rainbow, and the dangers of global warming and ozone depletion, which are completely related to the negative effects that humanity has created in relationship to the sun,” Erskine explains. Similar installations in Berlin and Los Angeles followed. “They were all dealing with healing the planet.”
With his 2003 works for the cancer center, Erskine moved from the global to the personal.
“What I’ve done here is zoom in on the element that needs to be healed mentally and physically,” he says. “People are stressed, they’re uncomfortable, they’re angry, they project it out on other people. People sitting in one of these rainbow beams don’t get stressed. It’s a very meditative, unwinding process. Maybe the way to make a contribution to global ecology isn’t so much a matter of working on that macro scale and trying to get people to know about global warming, but it’s maybe about healing the mind and body so we can bring a clearer awareness to these bigger issues.”
Science and Nature
To create “Healing Light,” Erskine worked with doctors, architects and support staff to get a sense of the center’s purpose and how the building would be used. Then he built a 6-foot by 4-foot model. “I made miniature prisms and miniature people and everything, and I spent a lot of time going through the space and seeing where the light would draw people in,” Erskine says. “As soon as somebody gets to the door, I want them to think, wow, what is going on in here?”To bring sunbeams into the building without the benefit of a skylight, Erskine installed a mirror on a rooftop about 110 feet away from the cancer center lobby. That mirror moves continuously to adjust for the rotation of the earth and reflect a steady stream of light toward other mirrors and prisms.
“I put extremely slow motors on the prisms so that the beams move around the room at the same rate as the rotation of the earth,” Erskine says. “This was a way to leverage nature. It was appropriate to have this connection between nature and technology because medical science is really this blending of nature and technology.”
Erskine confronted a different challenge in creating “Healing Shade” in the center’s garden, where a surfeit of sun could have obliterated his rainbows. He solved the problem by incorporating prisms into hardwood shade structures that cast their own shadows.
“On a hot day, the misters come on around the structures, so people are attracted to the coolness, and they’re attracted to the shade, and they’re attracted to a place to sit, and they’re attracted to the color,” Erskine says. “When they sit down, it kind of lies across their faces and shoes, so there are lots of levels of perception that unconsciously draw them to this healthful place to sit down.”
Despite the challenges, Rancho Mirage offered one advantage over most other sites.
“It’s really wonderful to know there will be sunlight virtually every day,” Erskine says.
