Rob and Nick Carter’s new light sculptures perform a captivating play between a word’s meaning and its visual appearance, expressing their curiosity that ‘language is abstract until you learn to read.’

The artists present each colour of the spectrum as kinetic neon words set on white powder coated aluminium. The colour names are then repeated in the other spectrum colours.

Initially derived from the ‘Stroop effect’ the psychological experiment which tests the effect of interference on reaction times, this transcription is highly engaging. The result of this shift, of gently opening up an area of play between the word and the thing it refers to, is to positively enhance the viewer’s experience of attaching associations to colour and language.

As is evident in the course of their work to date, particularly their discoveries of more nuanced aspects of photography, the Carters fruitfully expand our perception of apparently stable forms and meanings.  Here, it is in the collision of the verbal and visual that they present an essentially painterly quality of indeterminacy, a richness evocative of Marcel Duchamp’s belief that the artist’s role was to hold two contradictory positions simultaneously.