It's hard to experience a rainbow up close. The viewer is an important part of the creation of a rainbow. The rainbow itself is port of the positional relationship between the viewer, the sun and rain, as you move, so the rainbow moves too. There is no reaching the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, ever. We can gain glimpses of the rainbow though, we just can not walk through those giant sky arches of colour.
Waterfalls make rainbows and you can recreate the splitting of light in to the spectrum using a prism, or glass cut at the right angles. Many people place cut glass crystals in their windows to bring little rainbows in to a room (I need this in my life). Bevelled edges to a pane of glass can have the same effect. My hairdressers have bevelled edges to their mirrors and I love the little rainbows that appear round the room in the right light. On a smaller scale, I have a few pieces of jewellery I have made using Swarovski crystals that throw off multicoloured sparkles on sunny days as I drive.
You can get closer to experiencing a rainbow though... I was lucky enough to visit Olafur Eliasson's exhibition, "In Real Life" at the Tate Modern in London last year. It's not often I go to London, but my husband was determined to finish the Ride London and I went to the exhibition in the morning, before watching him finish the ride in the afternoon. He was a new artist to me but reading about him, he immediately appealed as he very much takes science and nature and brings them in to the art world.
Part of the exhibition was Rainbow Assembly where a fine mist and projected light allows you to experience a rainbow. It was beautiful and ephemeral. Also... wet... There were not very many adults playing in it. I of course went in and it was beautiful. Also... very hard to photograph! Luckily this article features many exquisite photos and a lovely video. There is also a VR experience available via the app Acute Art X but I couldn't get it to work as I don't think my internet is fast enough, also, I don't have a VR Headset. If you manage to use this, I would love to know what you think!
How much of experiencing a rainbow is about the colour of it all rather than the wet experience?Another rainbow installation by Olafur Eliasson is situated ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark where he won an opportunity to revitalise the roof space of the museum. The result is a stunning landmark that I would love to experience in person but the photos in this beautiful article go some way to conveying the experience. The viewer is able to enter a ring on top of the roof with glass sides and walk round, experiencing a 360 degree view of the city. Each panel of glass though, is a different colour of the spectrum, giving the installation it's name, Your Rainbow.
Light is an important part of a rainbow, after all, the colours are light, divided up into the different colours of light according to their wavelength. The way I always thought of it, it's like white light is made of a whole bunch of strings, all different colours, and those strings are in the shape of waves, moving through space. Waves like how a snake moves. They travel through air just fine, but glass is a little bit like water to them, it gives a little resistance, slows them down. If they go back out of glass into air, but they hit the glass at an angle, it gives a little drag on the last part of them to leave the glass, throwing their straight path off just a tiny fraction. The wavelength for each colour varies the wavelength is what effects how long they are affected by the drag of the glass, so some turn more than others and this results in the splitting of the light into the spectrum.
The same effect happens when light goes into the glass from the air, its like the wave hits treacle on one side first and that slide slows a little, turning slightly. The prism has sides at different angles and the effect is applied to the light twice, spreading the light out twice, emphasizing the effect. There are so many water droplets in the air when a rainbow forms, and each one acts like a tiny prism. This graphic on pinterest illustrates it really well.
I am not the only one to see the different colours as strings. Gabriel Dawe is an artist who uses string in his Plexus installations, many of which feature a spectrum of rainbow colours. They often give the illusion of colour dispersing, as the density of threads decreases. In galleries, they are often displayed to catch the light in a provocative way. I just want to touch them... I also like his relics series, where he takes the left over threads and places them in plexiglass boxes. You can even buy some left over threads in a glass pendant and they are very beautiful. I have a jar which is part full of bits of thread and I love how it looks. My pieces are much shorter though and the effect is very different. It adds a different dimension to the rainbow, texture.
Texture takes us further from the rainbow though, because rainbows don't have texture. Light illuminates texture. We see texture by the way in which light bounces off a surface but light itself has no texture. Glass and water are great for conveying a rainbow, because light can travel through them and texture does not need to be included as they can be completely smooth. You can create a rainbow in water with sugar and water soluble food colouring. Carrying layering the colours without mixing creates a coloured column, although the colours will slowly blend.
Many glass artists have created more permanent rainbows on all scales from tiny beads to giant windows and other installations. Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral has a Lantern Tower set with a rainbow of stained glass. I visited the cathedral many years ago and the memory of that amazing window has stayed with me. If you get the chance, go and have a look because photos can not truly capture it, because you can only see one section at a time.
Rainbow Church by Tokujin Yoshioka was inspired by the windows at the Chapelle du Rosaire and creates rainbows when light passes through a huge window made up of prisms. Kimsooja brought rainbows into her Rainbow Rooms by adding a film to the windows. More recently, I have seen a rainbow film being advertised online, but I have no idea how good it is, or whether I want to see rainbows more than I want to see outside. The idea of a space full of rainbows is so inspiring that its on my list of things to have if I win the lottery, a white room full of rainbows.
Of course, it is possible to create rainbows with light... Yvette Mattern created Global Rainbow using different colour lasers. The rainbow is such a popular motif that any light show can feature rainbow coloured lights and rainbow neon lights are easy to find online and cheap to buy. Fountains, bridges and buildings all over the world have sported rainbow lights. In a supermarket car park in Bude, there is a plastic tunnel to shelter customers from the frequent weather. Last Christmas, the tunnel was covered in LED lights and became Bude's number one tourist hot spot with people traveling hundreds of miles to visit.
Only one artist has created a rainbow using fireworks though. Cai Guo-Qiang's Transient Rainbow was an event that took place in 2002 in New York. It was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to commemorate the temporary move of the museum to Queens. The linked article includes videos from different viewpoints and it must have been an amazing event to witness.
For all our success at creating rainbows, we have not managed to create one quite like a natural rainbow, arching across a stormy sky. That would require a light source with the strength and coverage as our sun and a massive amount of water droplets in the air. Nature is awe inspiring....
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