My current work as Light + Magik takes its inspiration from events that began to unfold when I was living in a sweetshop around the age of six. I had a habit of playing in the dark with torches and mirrors, which was great fun, until one night something rather odd happened.
I was standing before the imposing full-length dressing table mirror in pitch blackness. The torch, which had been pointing into my eyes seconds earlier, was switched off. My eyes, however, were still brightly reflected in the mirror. I dropped the torch and blinked, still there. Turned around and rubbed my eyes. Still. There.
After that night, I had nightmares about eyes and mirrors for almost two decades, and the resulting spectrophobia and ommetophobia made daily life even more cumbersome than before. Mirrors had to be covered, and social interactions were almost impossible with the terrifying prospect of eye contact. In my nightly dream battles with mirrors, my courage gradually grew and teachers began to appear sharing advice, techniques and sometimes weapons.
One of these weapons was, I was told, an extension of the principle of using an equilateral triangle to trap spirits. This particular device was a block of clear material containing an array of triangular mirrors which were precisely angled to entrap and concentrate any antagonistic entity towards its centre, eventually compressing it into a single atom of carbon. This became the inspiration for my CARBON design. I haven’t actually tested it outside the dreamspace, but it’s rather pretty.
Inside the dreamspace a single use of this device was all it took to restore every mirror to its natural function. Even though this only happened once, I recall it vividly enough to rebuild it in the waking world as Goldripple.
Nowadays, it’s become a bit of a hobby of mine to deliberately seek out mirrors in dreams, just to gloat at how ordinary they look.
