Jordan Soderberg Mills Transforms a Historic Chapel With Light
Jordan Soderberg Mills, an artist celebrated for his immersive light installations globally, has reimagined the historic 15th-century Boondael Chapel in Brussels. His latest creation transforms the chapel's 14 windows into mesmerizing prismatic displays. Each window, framed in sleek black ironwork, now acts as a dynamic refractor of light, casting vibrant rainbow patterns that evolve throughout the day and with the changing seasons.
Soderberg Mills' artistic journey for this project was deeply influenced by his participation in a Design Museum Ghent exhibition. There, he explored the techniques of Jan Van Eyck, a master of layering transparent glazes to achieve profound optical effects. Inspired by an inscription in Ghent that depicted the Virgin Mary as the "reflection of eternal light," Soderberg Mills pondered how to visually represent such a concept. This led to his earlier work, Eternal Light + a Spotless Mirror, which explored the idea of multi-layered glazes. Although the Ghent exhibition's opening coincided with COVID-19 lockdowns, limiting public exposure, it fueled his desire to create more accessible and impactful works.
The opportunity to work on the Boondael Chapel arose from an open call for the former church, now an arts venue, with a unique condition: the glass had to be colorless and completely transparent. This presented a significant creative challenge for Soderberg Mills, whose work inherently revolves around color and light perception. To achieve his vision, he collaborated with Belgian fabricators specializing in laboratory glassware and train station window ironwork. The innovative solution involved long borosilicate glass tubes, or canes, star-shaped in cross-section, forming a ribbed surface. These canes are internally etched with billions of microscopic apertures that scatter light into spectral bands. A specialized film, typically used in spectrography and produced by a California lab, is embedded within these glass extrusions. This film, which reveals a star's composition through its chromatic signature, works in conjunction with the etched glass to refract daylight into a continuously shifting, vibrant spectrum of colors, effectively transforming the chapel into a living optical instrument.
The iron-framed windows, with their ability to curve and diffuse light, offer distinct visual experiences depending on the time of day and year, much like a sundial. Soderberg Mills describes this effect as creating a sense of constant motion and movement within a fixed structure, mirroring the planet's cosmic journey through space. This profound interplay of light, color, and architectural space invites visitors to engage in a contemplative and ever-changing "cosmological dance," bridging the historical reverence of the chapel with a contemporary artistic vision of light and perception.