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CAS Events

From Drawing to Light: The Making of THEMIS

Esther Rolinson, Sean Clark, Caroline Menezes

Title: From Drawing to Light: The Making of THEMIS
Date: 15th October 2026, 17:30 – 19:30
Location: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Multimedia artist Esther Rolinson discusses the making of THEMIS, her 30-metre digital light installation for Merlin Place in Cambridge. Joined by Sean Clark and Caroline Menezes, she explores how an intuitive drawing on paper becomes a large-scale public artwork, from initial ideas through fabrication, installation and the final audience experience.

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Video Recording

Esther Rolinson, Sean Clark and Caroline Menezes discuss how THEMIS develops from handmade drawings into a light installation wrapping around a Cambridge building. Rolinson begins with balance: between science and nature, interior and exterior, and interdependent elements. She describes negotiating architectural integration, screen resolution, visibility, wildlife considerations and energy use while developing an imaginative world through drawing. Early animation approaches threaten to lose the drawings’ texture, prompting a workflow based on scanned originals and close exchanges with animators. Clark explains his generative video mixer, built in Max, which combines backgrounds, intermediate sprites and foreground images according to compositional rules. Dividing animations into fifths accommodates the narrow architectural display and multiplies possible combinations; a configuration supports gallery presentation. He describes early software as a thinking tool rather than wasted development, stressing that experimentation shapes the final work. Menezes explores drawing as a connection between thought and gesture. Rolinson relates the title to an intuitive sense of balance and describes small narratives involving moons, water and flames that viewers recombine themselves. Questions address colour, breathing-like pacing, daylight operation and rejected weather responsiveness. Rolinson reflects on learning to draw with her other hand after injury and respecting collaborators’ creativity while serving the work.

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About the Event

Join multimedia artist Esther Rolinson for a special conversation exploring the making of THEMIS, her major new public artwork for Merlin Place in Cambridge. Rolinson will have an open discussion with exhibition curator Caroline Menezes and artist-programmer Sean Clark, who has programmed the artwork and is Chair of the Computer Arts Society. Reflecting on the Ruskin Gallery exhibition THEMIS: Seeing with Closed Eyes, the event opens a window into Rolinson’s creative process, from the immediacy of hand drawing to animation, generative systems, architecture and light.

Commissioned by Kadans Science Partner, a leading developer of real estate and ecosystems for technology-based sectors, THEMIS was created for Merlin Place, its purpose-built science and innovation building in north Cambridge. Rolinson’s work transforms more than 300 individual hand drawings into a generative system that can produce billions of possible combinations. The resulting artwork unfolds across a bespoke 30-metre LED structure on the building’s rooftop, extending the intimacy of drawing to an architectural and public scale.

The discussion will reveal how Rolinson moves between analogue and digital ways of making, and how an intensely personal studio process develops through her work with animators, programmers, architects and lighting specialists. It will consider drawing as a form of thinking: a space in which images, systems and movements can emerge before technical solutions are defined. It is also a discussion of Human-Machine agency, where technology is a catalyst for artistic creativity. The conversation offers an opportunity to look behind the finished artwork and follow the decisions and experiments through which Esther Rolinson created THEMIS.

About the Speakers

Esther Rolinson

Exhibitors, Speakers

Esther Rolinson

Esther Rolinson is a British multimedia artist whose practice brings together drawing, sculpture, light, programming and new media. Her hand drawings form the starting point for complex installations in which analogue gestures are extended into spatial, digital and generative systems. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Sean Clark

CASCOM, Speakers, Exhibitors

Sean Clark

Sean Clark is an independent artist, curator, and researcher based in Leicestershire, UK. His artwork explores interaction and connectedness through the construction of audiovisual systems presented on screen, as installations, and as prints. He is the director of Interact Digital Arts, the curator of the Computer Arts Archive and Chair of the Computer Arts Society. He holds a PhD in Computational Art from De Montfort University, where he studied under computer art pioneer Ernest Edmonds, and in 2016 was co-winner of the Lumen Prize for 3D/Sculpture and the Art.CHI Digital Art Prize.

Caroline Menezes

Speakers

Caroline Menezes

Caroline Menezes is a curator, art historian and researcher working at the intersection of art, creative technologies and artificial intelligence. She holds a PhD in History and Theory of Art from University of the Arts London. She is currently Co-Manager of the Institute for Digital Transformation & Innovation in Berlin. Her research and curatorial practice address human-centred AI, digital culture and the historical relationship between artistic practice and emerging technologies.