Featured in major exhibitions worldwide, New Zealand-born artist Bill Culbert has made the fluorescent tube his signature since 1968. Incandescence, translucency, shadow and latency are all central to Culbert’s long and prolific oeuvre of sculpture, installation and photography.

Fifty years ago, Culbert moved from New Zealand to London to study painting, a decade later his investigations brought him to the manipulation of light and shadow – in natural and electrical form – as a restrained and potent language of discovery and metamorphosis. The fluorescent straight tube might even be viewed as an archaeological measuring device, calibrating and illuminating a vertical time line of things recovered from the midden or décharge of discarded objects.