Transcending the Invisible Artist David Penny posed the question ‘What happens when you make a photograph using a single wavelength of light?’ in his recent exhibition Scatterings, hosted in the Arcade at Bush House. The show brought together a series of cameraless photographic works created during his residency with the Photonics and Nanotechnology Group in the Department of Physics.
Working alongside researchers exploring the invisible world of nanomaterials, Penny has created images that are as much about discovery as they are about documentation. Using lasers instead of lenses, and photographic paper instead of pixels, he captures the moment light interacts with matter, transforming it, observing it, and making it visible.
The exhibition included black-and-white works from the series Across Paths and Into Fields, which trace the path of a laser as it moves through a Raman spectroscopy system. These images don’t just represent nanomaterials, they emerge from them. The laser’s energy both reveals and reshapes the material, creating a visual record of something too small to see with even the strongest microscope.
In Registrations, Penny moves the laser from the lab to the studio. Here, he builds images slowly, painting with light across photographic paper to create layered photograms. Shadows of objects accumulate over time, revealing themselves only through the photographic process. The result is a set of works that feel both precise and poetic.
Inspired by the humble push-pin—a small but significant part of photography’s history—Penny has also created handmade pins used in the making and display of the works. These tools have left their own mark, becoming part of the images themselves.
Scatterings is part of Transcending the Invisible, a project funded by the Royal Society Public Engagement Fund. The initiative embeds artists within scientific research groups to foster creative dialogue and public engagement. Penny’s collaboration with physicist Dries Maurice has produced a body of work that brings the world of nanophotonics into focus, where materials smaller than a wavelength of light interact with energy in ways that could transform healthcare, sustainability, and more.
