SIDELIGHTS
As well as its visual and metaphorical sense of "lit from the side, or a tangential insight" a sidelight, in British usage, is a window located to the side of something, typically a door. As opposed to a fanlight (or "transom" in US usage), which goes above the door. We live in a typical 1930s semi-detached house, with an elaborate part-glazed front door and sidelights made up of leaded panes of various types of pebbled glass, in a vaguely Art Deco sort of pattern. You see street upon street of such arrangements in all of the older city suburbs, generally in combination with a porch. Some are very fancy indeed, especially the Victorian ones using stained glass, and more often than not each house in the street has a different design; glaziers must have been coining it in those days. As our house faces south-east, the morning sun shines directly through this glass frontage, so it has become a very familiar set of shapes over the years: on a bright morning, the lattice of lead cames is practically burned onto your retina as you come downstairs.
A few years ago, I abstracted the lead skeleton of the three lights and the silhouette of the door and wooden side panels from a photograph and began a series of photo-collages, in which various textures and views were combined to differing degrees of effectiveness and incongruity. It was fun to do: you just dropped a new photograph into either the black "positive" or the white "negative" shapes to see what would happen. The results seemed to have something to say about "inside" versus "outside", the domestic versus the urban environment, and so on.
