Janetka Platun Cataract 2023. Toughened glass, chalk 50 x50 x 50cm

Absence of Light is a series of sculptural pieces exploring the contradictions of loss and survival, adherence and separation, lightness and weight, fragments and recreation. They explore the shadow that accompanies us through life, and how the absence of light has shaped our stories, spirituality and culture.

The works on show are an abstract language of loss that merge science with superstition. A selection of the work, are in collaboration with Dr Kurt Kolansinki, Professor of Physical Chemistry at West Chester University. Central to their collaboration is black silicon. When the beam of a pulsed laser is directed onto a silicon wafer, the exposed area appears blackened, creating a dark terrain void of light.

Janetka Platun’s practice is concerned with experiences and temporalities of memory and loss, absence and presence and the traces these leave – on bodies, on matter, on places. Her art attends to the inter-relational complexities of people, place, time, memory and desire. It is shaped by phenomenological ideas, posing questions about our existential and moral relationship to ourselves and our surroundings.

Janetka originally studied sculpture at Camberwell School of Arts and was an Artist Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Her trans-disciplinary projects with scholars and migrant communities in the UK and worldwide have explored the disorientating and non-linear effects of migration.

In 2025 Janetka exhibited her installation ‘On the Art of Teeth’ at Barts Pathology Museum. Her public art commission ‘There Were People’ commemorated the post war Polish refugee camp in Hiltingbury, Hampshire. She is currently showing ‘Descending Order’ at ‘Open a Book’, Capel Bethel, Wales.

Kurt W Kolasinski is a Professor of physical chemistry at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After reading chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, he obtained his PhD in Chemical Physics from Stanford University. Following an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin and a National Research Council Resident Research Associateship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD, USA, he held faculty positions at the University of Birmingham, Queen Mary University of London, University of Virginia, and finally West Chester. His research focuses on surface science, laser/surface interactions and nanoscience with particular emphasis on the production and reactivity of nanostructures.

He is the author of over 125 scholarly publications as well as the textbooks Surface Science: Foundations of Catalysis and Nanoscience and Physical Chemistry: How Chemistry Works. He is the content creator for the YouTube channel Kolasinski’s Physical Chemistry https://www.youtube.com/@kolasinskispchem. He is also the author of Most na Odrze/Oder Bridge/Oderbrücke, a photo essay on the complicated relationship of Poland and Germany and the author’s own story. Adapted into a screenplay with Cinzia Rivieri and into a documentary film The Oder Bridge with Olaf Högermeyer.