Milk Glass Light (2017 - present)

This project reveals a personal story that traces the global reach of industrial modernist objects. Researching a photographic archive gifted by her father, an architect with the Public Works Department in Nigeria throughout the 1950’s, Stevenson noticed that a modernist glass light fitting in the black and white photos were also in an Auckland University building. These images were of a telephone exchange building in Aba, Nigeria, which had caught on fire. Other photographs show the building under construction, however due to mould on the negatives, display the effect of the building on fire. It’s an uncanny retrospective foretelling of the building’s fate. An identical light fitting was then discovered in an Auckland retro shop. Questions remain about the origin and production of these lights. Re-photographing the lights in the University building, re-representing the archival images, and footage of the object itself, bring together unlikely elements of this narrative spanning the globe and illuminating a trajectory of colonial-modern industrialisation.

Elam B building, University of Auckland, 2017