John Hansard Gallery is proud to present a new project by artist Morgan Quaintance.
Available Light (2025) is major new film developed through an innovative research partnership with cultural sociologist Laura Harris. Shot while visiting Japan, this immersive work explores notions of home and belonging through interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum, juxtaposed with conversations featuring renters in both Tokyo and London. These elements spark a thought-provoking dialogue between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often-unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities.
Utilising Morgan Quaintance‘s signature sound design and 16mm film techniques, Available Light creates a dreamlike dialogue between the museum’s preserved historical ideals of domesticity and the precarity of temporary accommodation in urban Japan, as seen by an outsider.
Two short films accompany Available Light. Seeikokan III is a direct animation work, using the technique of ink drawing on film to make use of the left-over, or unused, 16mm material shot in Tokyo, whilst Walking Distance takes footage of Mount Fuji and combines it with subtitles that explain the distances from Quaintance’s temporary home in Tokyo and the most frequently visited sites during his stay in 2024.
Available Light was shot and produced as part of a parallel collaboration with Anniversary Fellow and University of Southampton’s Senior Research Fellow, Laura Harris. Designed as a research experiment, Harris proposed the question: what would happen if an artist and sociologist were to embark on research together, on equal footing?
What emerged was not a collaboration as such, but rather a scenario that allowed them to work on parallel tracks – treating interdisciplinarity as a way of ‘letting in more light’.
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