Celyn Bricker at Tate Modern Late

As part of Swatch Social - a collaboration between Tate Modern Lates and Swatch - former artist-in-residence Celyn Bricker held a workshop based on his ‘lighthouse’ project around bird-safe glass.

Lighthouse is an experimental project that explores using art as a way to support biodiversity protection, and worked as part of a project with NGOs and non-profit partners to build a case for policy change in China.

Lighthouse proposes a creative solution to the issue of birds collisions with buildings, finding and designing the solution from a more-than-human perspective. Unlike humans, many birds are able to see UV light, meaning that glass coated with the right combination of UV materials will be visible to birds, while remaining invisible to human observers. Bird collisions with buildings are an often overlooked biodiversity issue - it is estimated a billion birds die in collisions with glass structures in the US each year, with comparable numbers in Europe.

During the workshop Participants were given UV pens, and invited to draw collectively onto the glass and paper sheets. What they were drawing remained invisible to themselves and each other. Only by using a UV light the the collective drawings were revealed to the audience.

Celyn Bricker (b.1989) is a British visual artist whose work explores the complex and often contradictory relationship between human technology and the natural world. He explores this theme across a range of media: from interactive digital works to painting, printmaking and installation.

The artist was in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in 2021. Discover his trace in the Virtual Museum.