Monsoon / Aurora

Walk past this piece and it changes color under you — deep blue from one spot, then purple, green, a flash of gold from another. There are no screens and no electronics doing it. The color shift is built into the glass itself. Monsoon / Aurora pairs carved dark-wood waves with special color-shifting (dichroic) glass, so the piece behaves differently depending on where you stand and how the light falls.

The science here is genuinely space-age. Dichroic glass carries ultra-thin layers of metal oxides, and the color you see comes from thin-film interference — certain wavelengths of light get reflected while others pass through, so the color changes with the viewing angle [Dichroic Glass, Skyjems]. The technology was developed for aerospace: as NASA's own Spinoff publication puts it, "NASA revitalized the production of dichroic glass in the 1950s and 1960s as a means of protecting its astronauts" and their instruments from unfiltered sunlight and radiation [Ultra-Thin Coatings Beautify Art, NASA Spinoff]. It later crossed over to art through people who had worked on the aerospace side — My Modern Met credits former aerospace engineer Murry Schwartz, who worked in the 1960s for NASA contractor Wallin Optical Systems, as a pioneer of dichroic glass as an art material. So the shimmer on your wall runs on the same optical trick that shields astronaut visors.

The name joins two natural light shows. One is the aurora — the northern lights. Those colors are made when charged particles from the sun hit gases high in Earth's atmosphere: oxygen glows green (at a wavelength of 557.7 nm) and red, while nitrogen adds blue, purple and pink [The Colors of the Aurora, US National Park Service]. Green is the most common; the rarer reds and purples show up during strong solar activity [Aurora colors, Space.com]. The other half of the name is the Indian monsoon — the southwest rains that arrive first in Kerala around the start of June and, according to the India Meteorological Department, supply "about 75 per cent of India's annual rainfall," the water the whole country's harvest depends on [WION, citing IMD]. The monsoon has its own colors in Indian culture: the raga family Malhar is "inextricably linked to the rejuvenating effects of rain," and Miyan ki Malhar was said to be sung to summon the monsoon itself [Ragajunglism]. The carved waves are the rain and the sea; the glass is the aurora and the changing sky.