Tepees

Mixed media (fluorescent light tubes, colour filters, electric fence energisers)

The lighting technique used in Tepees was first discovered when Munro was looking for a way to keep his wife’s chickens safe from the foxes at their rural home in Wiltshire. A local farmer came to the rescue offering a solution in the guise of a device that combined an electric fence system with a redundant fluorescent lighting tube (one that has been spent).  Years later Munro decided that tepee structures were the best composition for the fluorescent tubes. He was pleased with the result both formally and personally, for the mythic American West as depicted in films and TV had held his imagination as a boy growing up in England.

This piece cannot be experienced through photographs in the same way as it can in real time. The flashes of the fluorescent tubes happen so quickly that the eye doesn’t see the tepees lit all in a group, only the intermittent flashing tubes of light. But the camera lens captures the entire series of flashes so the lighted form of the whole installation is revealed.