Light Art From Skylines

“I need to connect to the image”

Rosan Sison-Holmes

Necessity, it is said, is the mother of invention and when her sister, boredom, joins the party, together they often become the imperative for a creative ménage a trios.  Such was the case for the Filipino photographer Rosan Sison-Holmes.

She is a corporate high flyer with a photographic hobby, but as she told The Expat in an email interview “once I was past the family get-together shots and the wonderful sunsets, there came the sudden itch . . . to do something different, unique, and untried (at least by me). It wasn’t going to be another macro shot, another portrait nor another landscape shot.”

In Singapore at the behest of her day job, Sison-Holmes found herself in another anonymous hotel room whilst outside the city’s evening skyline twinkled. Drawn by the lights Sison-Holmes took her camera out onto the balcony to better enjoy the view. As she said “I stepped out onto the hotel balcony which directly faced the marvelous Singapore skyline, and for the very first time, I created random images from light that emanated from the structures before me.  If I was a musician making music . . . the music could be described as dissonant but interesting. What started almost as child’s play to pass the time quickly developed into exploring a fine-art photographic pursuit.”

As The Philippine Star newspaper wrote about her first solo exhibition Eureka, “Through self-study and continuing experimentation, she has refined what were once raw, unstructured and even chaotic images. She painstakingly works on each shot until she finds “The image within the image.” Rosan’s patience and her exacting nature are a perfect fit to what she does.”

Sison-Holmes has broadened her subject matter for the creation of her “Light Art.” She now includes car headlights and taillights, street lamps, neon signs, even the light from kids’ toys and electronic gadgets, and along with the city skylines they all have their place in her repertoire.

Still involved in the corporate world with her own company, Exsellsys, Sison-Holmes regularly flies around Asia to deliver sales training courses and visit skylines that range from Australia to India.

Sison-Holmes “Light Art” can be seen on permanent display at Makati City’s Cattelan Italia showroom.