‘Bewilderingly evanescent’: how a darkroom allergy made Barbara Kasten see the light

Sunshine beams down on Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion for the first time since Barbara Kasten arrived to install her first institutional solo show in the UK. Standing outside, where the modernist building faces the wide sea front, the 88-year-old American artist is delighted. Ghostly pink shapes wriggle behind the huge windows. Devising the show, at home in Chicago, she’d feared the sunlight would be too strong, causing a photographic white-out, but no: “The light here is so gentle.”

Inside the exhibition hall, the wriggling pink light is revealed as reflections on fluorescent acrylic plexi-panels, which are clamped into what Kasten conceives as large stage flats. She has yet to decide on their final placement when I visit, but is clear that this is “the backstage area”. The expanse of windows facing the sea is the “proscenium arch”, which she has accentuated with columns of brightly coloured perspex. They lean up against the window frames, casting their own colours dramatically across the floor and each other, while mixing into something mysteriously different in the plexi-panels behind them.

Kasten’s abstract art stands at the intersection of photography, sculpture, installation and painting in a way that is reflected in her biography. Born in Chicago in 1936, she caught the art bug as a seven-year-old at a Catholic school after her talent was spotted by one of the nuns. She did a first degree in painting before setting off for Europe, where she found a job running art classes for the families of American soldiers in Germany. There she discovered Bauhaus architecture and the radical textiles of the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz.

After deciding that art rather than teaching was her vocation she returned to the US to further her studies, but was turned down for a graduate degree in painting, so opted instead for one in crafts, where she experimented with textiles and was introduced to photography. “I didn’t know much about it beforehand, I have had no training in it per se,” she says. But she married a photographer, Leland Rice, and together they became discerning collectors of avant garde work from the black and white era of Man Ray and Francis Bruguière.

Her own work has predominantly involved bright colour. Discovering that she was allergic to darkroom chemicals, she took photography in a different direction, using light-sensitive emulsion on paper and exposing it to sunlight to create photograms, a process which, she says, is more like painting. “It’s between you and the canvas, between you and the print. I feel like I’m still using a photographic process in the way I’m making these sculptures and installations.”

The downside of installation-based art is that it doesn’t last. To date she has made only one permanent public work, a mural in Toronto that she has yet to see in person. But she has become increasingly influential, with pieces in the Tate and New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

In the pre-digital era, the brilliantly-hewed, geometrical pictures and collages that have become her calling cards on the international art market were composed using a large Polaroid camera. Whereas a conventional photographer would take many shots and select works from a proof sheet, she says, “I worked like a painter. I would make an image and get instant feedback. And so, when I wanted to see something different in an image, I could rearrange what I was photographing. It was like going into a painting and changing the shape or colour, but I was doing it in three dimensions, because I was making a sculptural setup to photograph.”

Everything she has done has been extracted from objects that catch her interest due to the materials or their connection to architecture, she says. “Because I’m out in the world, finding images that I can then reconstruct, I have to be as hands-on as a sculptor. So it’s like making an abstract painting, really, but mixing several media together. And that’s what I’ve always been interested in: how do you expand one medium to work with another and become something entirely different?”

Though she doesn’t consider herself to be a political artist, there is a political dimension to this. “I feel that abstraction is overlooked for its importance in how it can be active in promoting a new way of thinking about life,” she says. “If you can experience and be open-minded to what this experience could be, maybe that attitude could then apply to other realities, like the politics of our times.”

As she heads towards her 10th decade, Kasten shows no signs of slowing down or resting on her laurels. This afternoon, she is meeting up with a photographer to explore some ideas she has for making pictures from the installation in progress. “But I don’t want it to be a documentation. It’s more experimenting with what is happening in the light.” The most important part of all her work, she says, is the shadows, which are always changing.

Everything is so bewilderingly evanescent that I take some phone snaps of my own to fix it in my memory. On the train home, I find I have accidentally made a semi-abstract portrait of Kasten herself, elegantly undulating on a pink panel, her face turned inquisitively over her shoulder. It perfectly illustrates her point: a play of light and surface creating something entirely unexpected.

• Barbara Kasten: Site Lines is at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, until 1 September