Thomas Brown's creative project looks at naming, buying art and creating work

Taking place across a series of prints; a dedicated website and interactive social media and a gallery show, Thomas Brown’s latest project Volume of Light is an innovative one, and places the viewer in the role of the artist. It does this by allowing anyone to name each work, and in doing so means each takes on a meaning completely out of the artist’s control.

The series comprises 469 images, and each “represent the record of an action, a passage of time and a movement of light,” according to Thomas. “In their abstraction they represent no thing but leave space to become every thing.”

The images are hosted on the project’s website and are open for people to “adopt” one and choose their title for it, as long as the name is within 47 characters. Thomas explains: “The assigned titles will forever be linked to the image. Volume of Light wants to know what you see, how you see it and begin to understand why certain choices are made. It is an exploration and investigation of semiotics, the phenomenon of Pareidolia and authorship.”

As well as offering a canny and innovative way of approaching the art market, the project has wider aims to explore ideas around naming and the conception of an artwork. Thomas ponders: “I wonder, what came first, the word, or the thing? Why have a word if there was no thing? Does the thing come into existence when it has been assigned a word or is the word created as a gift to the thing?”