Start the Week The Dark
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Dec 15, 2025 Jean Sprackland, a poet exploring our relationship with darkness, discusses how fear and delight coexist in the dark. She describes caving experiences that reveal transcendental aspects of darkness. Photographer Jasper Goodall shares his night-time woodland images, born from personal grief, and explains his innovative techniques using light. Meanwhile, Christine Riding delves into Joseph Wright of Derby's candlelight paintings, highlighting their dramatic contrasts and cultural significance, linking art with the scientific and industrial zeitgeist of his time.
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Darkness Is More Than Absence
- Darkness carries cultural metaphors that obscure its physical reality and effects on bodies and place.
- Jean Sprackland argues darkness is essential to life and endangered by artificial light.
Cave Darkness Became Balm
- Jean Sprackland described being led cave-exploring with teens and dreading switching torches off.
- When the group sat in the dark she felt claustrophobia fall away and experienced a transcendent, edgelessness.
Darkness Alters Sense Of Time
- Michel Siffre's cave isolation showed human circadian rhythms drift without light cues.
- Time perception can desynchronize weeks from surface clock time during prolonged darkness.
