Lucy Preston and Winnie Ulland – L.C. Bates Museum Summer 2026 Exhibition

What follows is the script and slides from the PechaKucha Night presentation delivered on 10 April 2026 at the Strand Theatre in Rockland, Maine.

 

The L.C. Bates Museum is an important local natural history museum in Hinckley, Maine. Its encyclopedic collection includes an extensive array of Maine wildlife dioramas, archaeological objects, art, and more. A true cabinet of curiosities, the L.C. Bates is a hidden gem and the perfect setting for our summer exhibition.

Since 2009, Colby students have curated the L.C. Bates Museum’s annual summer exhibition under the supervision of Professor Véronique Plesch. Every year, the exhibition brings together contemporary artists from across Maine and explores different aspects of Maine’s natural world, such as Gardens, Transitions, or Wilderness and Culture, to build a curatorial dialogue.

This year, the theme of the summer exhibition is Light. Indispensable to life, processed in photosynthesis, and determining cycles such as day and night and the seasons, light is also fundamental to artistic creation. Given the L.C. Bates Museum’s focus on natural history, artists were invited to consider the effects of natural and artificial light in their works.

Light has played a fundamental role in artistic movements, from the Renaissance to Impressionism and Luminism, and has symbolic value, visually translating notions such as “enlightenment,” “seeing the light,” or “being in the dark.” Light acts as both a compositional tool and an interpretive device, guiding the audience while shaping emotional and intellectual responses to a work.

Artists approached the theme of light from a variety of angles, beginning with landscapes rendered in traditional styles. We see artists considering different times of day, locations, and seasons, making choices to capture distinct forms of light. These works often come from direct observation, shaped by artists’ anticipation and response to rapidly changing conditions.

In nocturnal scenes, artists engage with a quieter, more elusive form of light, while exploring themes of memory and perception. The works in the exhibition demonstrate artists’ connections to the natural world, as well as their understanding of human impact, particularly through the growing presence of artificial light and its effect on the night sky.

Natural structures, such as trees, shape experiential relationships to light, responding to it in diverse and dynamic ways. In these works, trees are not static subjects, but living systems that absorb light and interact with their surroundings, carrying a sense of energy and transformation. Branches and leaves create patterns that guide the eye, enlivening the landscape and determining an experience of the natural world.

Photographic depictions of light lead to considerations of both process and medium. These nature-based photographs create an awareness of how light moves, both through a lens and across a landscape. Artists consider photography as painting with light, emphasizing both observation and timing. In these works, medium is both subject and tool, foregrounding the overall behavior of light.

Light is an opportunity for innovation. By manipulating how light interacts with her subjects, Carol Eisenberg transforms ordinary objects into optical experiences. In her works, light saturates and floods the image, bleaching color and dissolving form so that objects flicker between presence and absence. Maury Colton’s Night Writing is inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s encounter with the last embers of a campfire. The work captures light at the moment it begins to fade. Both artists think about light as an experience, and light as a spark to creation.

Works in this grouping also probe the alteration of light, but their focus is on how built features of the physical world change its effects. They consider how windows, tunnels, and claw machine cases redirect and contain light, transforming how both object and light are seen.

These paintings are part of a set painted by Jill Madden as she watched the sunrise over Great Spruce Head Island. Rather than focusing on the details of the scene, the works’ focal point is the light itself and its experience. They convey not just how light looks, but how it feels: fleeting, atmospheric, and constantly shifting.

Similarly these works, which capture the aurora borealis, render the experience of witnessing incredible light conditions. Auroras occur when particles from the sun interact with Earth’s atmosphere and thus straddle two worlds. The vibrancy of these colors and the scale at which these scenes are painted is surreal in that they bring outer space into a human dimension while preserving its otherworldly beauty.

These works move beyond the earthly atmosphere and engage the cosmos directly, drawing on astronomical observations gleaned by John Meader’s use of a personal planetarium. Through vivid, often exaggerated colors, they serve as a means for translating far away celestial phenomena into something visually immediate and emotionally legible. In doing so, they collapse the distance between viewer and universe.

Light is mediated through the environment. These works move away from depicting light as a source and towards rendering its effects on space and perception. Rather than simply observe light, the artists emphasize its experiential power. Light invites introspection and allows both artist and audience to dwell in moments of natural and personal transformation, forming renewed connections to their surroundings.

These works have a resonant feeling, an almost palimpsestic energy that layers light memory and form. Both works begin with a direct encounter, a glowing gas station at night or fog and moonlight along the Maine coast, which the artists then reworked and revisited in a studio. During this process, the light becomes something built and accumulated; it is not simply observed, it is reimagined and filtered through memory, resulting in a layered atmospheric presence.

Joël LeVasseur’s works extend that palimpsestic quality by layering not only observation and memory, but also multiple sources of light. In Tidal Pool, Rachel Carson Preserve, New Harbor, Maine, traces of fire are embedded into marine forms, replacing reflected sky with a remembered, internal glow. In Surf, Pemaquid Point Maine, the light emerges through the whiteness of the surf itself, partially revealing and obscuring figures in a ghostlike scene. In both, light is further removed from direct perception, and instead reconstructed through the paradigms of memory, material, and imagination.

In the works in this grouping, light is shown as something that unfolds over time rather than appearing instantly. These aren’t single moments of illumination. Instead, they capture light as a trace, something that is embedded in materials, diffused in the atmosphere, or the product of movement. Light thus becomes a record of duration and memory, detached from form.

The relationship between light and time is further explored in these end-of-day studies by Melanie Essex, which capture subtle shifts in lighting across two July evenings, marking a transition from the beginning of the month to its end. These studies use light as a gradual temporal marker, depicting seasonal change and creating a heightened awareness of the impact of light on our perception of time.

Works in this summer’s exhibition remind us that while light is fleeting and subjective, it shapes how we see, feel, and understand the world around us. It reveals and obscures, shaping perception and connecting the physical world to emotional experiences. Light is not only a visual phenomenon but a mode of reflection that invites us to consider our relationship to the natural world.

We are honored to have been part of this multi-year curatorial tradition. This exhibition is one moment within a larger unfolding story, one shaped over years by many voices. Like this PechaKucha, meaning emerges through accumulation, through brief encounters that stay with us. We hope you’ll continue that experience and see how these works come together in the space of the L.C. Bates Museum.

 

The L.C. Bates 2026 summer exhibition, Light, runs through 3 October 2026. The museum is located at 14 Easler Road, Hinckley, ME 04944. View the virtual exhibition online.

 

Full view of the image at top: L.C. Bates Museum, Hinckley, Maine.