Artist uses cyanotypes to 'chase the light' in Marquand Chapel

Like so many visitors to Yale Divinity School, Julia Rooney was entranced by the light in Marquand Chapel. Rooney, a 2018 graduate of the Yale School of Art, was contemplating a site-specific exhibition at the school and was touring the campus in search of inspiration.

She found what she was looking for when she stepped inside Marquand. With its twin banks of windows, white columns, and blonde wood décor, the sanctuary felt “suffused with light,” she recalled. Most especially, she was taken by the architectural presence of the high arched windows and the shadows their crisscross panes cast on the honeyed floor.

Though she thinks of herself primarily as a painter, Rooney turned to photography to capture Marquand’s luminous illumination. Specifically, she chose the 19th-century process of cyanotype, exposing chemically coated pieces of linen directly to the daylight coming in the windows. The results are on view in Tilt, an exhibition of Rooney’s cyanotypes displayed in the YDS Croll Family Entrance Hall through the end of the academic year.

The works, Rooney observes in the exhibition’s artist statement, are “analog photographs made with and of the light passing through the Chapel.”  The show offers an opportunity to contemplate Marquand as both an empyrean of light and a workshop of artistic creation. 

Cyanotype is a camera-less photographic technique that relies on the exposure of ultraviolet light directly onto a surface treated with photosensitive ferric salts. The process creates a final image where areas contacted by light are rendered blue, while objects that stop the light leave unexposed sections that read as white silhouettes. Cyanotype technology was long used for making architectural blueprints and other utilitarian copy jobs. But the technique was first developed in 1840 as an expressive medium and persists into the digital age as a tool for artists.

In choosing to work with the antique process, Rooney embraced limitations that defined the final work. She hand-coated the cyanotype emulsion onto the linen substrate in her Manhattan basement studio and transported them to New Haven in opaque bags. The sensitized fabric was laid out in patches of light and shadow on the Marquand floor and walls, where they required exceptionally long exposure times, typically 20 minutes or more. The artworks were then washed in plain water and hung or spread out to dry. The finished linen sheets were then stretched taut onto wooden stretcher bars, the support traditionally used for oil paintings.

The artist chose two astronomically significant dates to work on-site, the weeks of the autumnal equinox of September 22 and the winter solstice exactly three months later. The title Tilt is a reference to the change of the earth’s axis relative to the sun at those times. The vastly different angles of light coming through the Marquand windows affected the project both technically and aesthetically, changing exposure times and varying the outcomes. The long exposures resulted in constant movement of the sun and a corresponding shift of cast-shadow formations. At times, Rooney was literally “chasing the light” as she attempted over the duration of an exposure to adjust the image to match the moving shadows.   

The YDS exhibition is anchored by seven of the cyanotype pieces, ranging in height from 16 to 72 inches. Their blue fields, rather than showing the dark hue of a traditional blueprint, modulate from the cerulean of an autumn day to the pale indigo of faded denim. The works are marked with white outlines and shapes that range from parallel bands and window-pane grids to billows of cloud and watery milk. Because of the exposure times, there are no hard lines or (given changes of color saturation and the shifting reflectance of the fabric’s creases, wrinkles, and puckers) broad areas of solid color. The images look less like photographic documents than they do shimmering impressions and ghostly exhalations.   

For the show, Rooney has augmented the cyanotypes with five smaller, arch-shaped paintings of radiating red, green, and blue rays. Shaped to match the Marquand windows’ gothic design, each painting is a meditation on the phenomenon of light. As vibrant as the cyanotypes are muted, these works evoke the three primary colors of light whose wavelengths combine to create white light. Embedded in each painting is a torn scrap of cyanotype, suspended like a specimen in a bell jar or relic in a reliquary. Like traces of the project’s genesis, this “RGB” motif is also represented on the edges of some stretcher bars or faintly visible in the cyanotypes themselves.

“The colors vibrate beside each other, making them hard to look at,” Rooney’s statement says of the arched paintings, “and yet, if you shift your gaze immediately to a cyanotype, a prismatic afterimage appears on the surface of the print. There are all the colors in the white light.” 

I interviewed Rooney both before and after viewing the show at YDS, about her background, the origins of her exhibition, and her working process. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Timothy Cahill: In what ways do you think your background prepared you for the life of an artist?

Julia Rooney: I grew up in New York City, in downtown Manhattan. My father writes indexes for books, and one of his specialties is art books, exhibition monographs, catalog raisonnés, etc. My mother has had many paths. She worked as a scientific illustrator, taught writing, got an M.F.A. in poetry, and then worked with my father as an indexer. Finally, she became an art therapist and Teaching Artist. She’s now working on a manuscript of poems about coal. Art was just around a lot. It shaped the way I saw the world.

You went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Did you go there knowing what you wanted to study?

I went to LaGuardia High School, which is an art and performing-arts high school. That was a fully immersive experience—we had academics, but the focus was on art production. I loved that time, but after such an art-heavy environment, I wanted more of an academic trajectory. I thought I might study philosophy or anthropology.

But you ended up majoring in art.

About a year and a half in, I asked myself, why am I fighting this? Why am I trying to prove to this community that I can talk and write and think as they do, when really what I want to do is paint? There was some tussle within me, in part from being in a place where a lot of people might not have thought of art as a rigorous pursuit, or not as intelligent a practice as language-driven disciplines. Once I made that decision, though, the floodgates opened and I met a wonderful community of people, many of whom I’m still in touch with.

From there you moved to the Yale School of Art. 

Yale ended up being a place where I explored things that were more architectural, things that existed physically in space. A lot of the learning happened in studio visits that to me were the essence of the program, more than the group critique sessions, which had perhaps an outsized reputation. The“pit crits”— big public forums where like 60 people come and critique your work —have a kind of allure and fascination, in part because they’re public, but the real essence of the program for me was the one-on-one studio visits with visitors from outside of the school, as well as core faculty and peers. Those were invaluable, because people really cared. It’s hard to find such a concentrated environment where everybody cares so deeply about what it is you’re doing, even when it’s hard to describe that to yourself sometimes. But somehow everybody believes that what you’re doing matters. Even artists whose work I didn’t particularly resonate with—I felt everybody there was really solid in their pursuit, everybody was asking deep questions.

Still, art school is an environment that can be extremely insular and self-absorbed, and one of the things that kept me grounded while I was there was working at the Yale University Art Gallery as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher. Working there was probably as important to me as being at the School of Art, because I met students from other parts of the university, including many from the Divinity School, whose perspectives about artworks were totally different than mine.

Let’s talk about your YDS project and the works in Tilt. How did you end up working in Marquand Chapel?

Tom Krattenmaker [YDS Director of Communications and chair of the Art Committee that oversees artwork on the Divinity School campus] had invited me to have an exhibition at the school. We had met in 2018 during the last few months of my time at the School of Art. He was coming through the school looking for art and ended up buying works from my thesis exhibition.

This is the artwork hanging in the Old Common Room now?

Yes. It’s actually two pieces combined into a single work. For my thesis, I made a series of flat, double-sided screens that had holes through them where light passed through. These were hanging in my studio when Tom visited, where I also had this other painting I’d been working on, called Eve Alone, a copy of a Masaccio fresco I’d seen in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. We decided that it would make sense in the context of the Div School to put the two separate pieces together, which gives them a very different meaning.

Yes. The portrait of Eve is visible through one of the leaf-shaped openings in the screen. You don’t notice it at first, and then you do, with the force of a revelation. An interesting aspect of that earlier work is the way the screen is made up of a series of discreet panels, which in light of your Marquand project, look a lot like the panes of glass in the chapel windows.

Now that I look back, it was exactly the same idea that I’m now exploring. It turns out to be a longstanding interest of mine. I went back and looked, and it’s also in the drawings in my Italy sketchbooks from the summer of 2010. Nearly everything is a study of architecture, many focusing specifically on the pattern of windows across building facades—residential, religious, contemporary, ancient. I hadn’t really made that connection until now.

Which brings us back to Marquand …

Tom had invited me to have an exhibition at the school. I said I wanted it to be new work, and I really wanted it be site specific. So, we did a site visit together in August 2025. He took me through all the spaces, and I was very interested in the light coming through the windows, particularly within the chapel. It was morning, and the light was raking, creating very strong shadows on the floor. I thought this is where the project should start, chasing the light of this space that’s the heart of the spiritual practice here.

The light does have a certain sovereignty there, doesn’t it? I can see why you chose to use cyanotype as your medium. As you say in your artist statements, these are photographs “made with and of the light” in Marquand. 

Exactly. The thing I have found to be the most surprising part of this whole experience is how little my input as an artist came to bear on the process. I mean, of course I set up the whole thing and orchestrated the conditions. But it felt like my role was really to step back and to let the light do its work. And I love that word that you use,“sovereignty,” because the light has its own logic. The light does what it does, and does not care what we do as humans. It’s a hard thing as an artist to realize that your ideas about something are not as important as what actually needs to unfold. My pictures are like windows of time. I wanted to record those windows, and in some respect pay tribute to them.

Light of course is incorporeal; you can’t hold it, you can only record its effect. And yet there’s such materiality to these pieces. They’re on linen, and the surface of the fabric gets creased or pinched or buckled, and when you come in close there’s the woven texture of the fabric. And to this, you’ve added thick pigment on the frames, and a ghostly wash of color on some of the prints. So, there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of matter happening here. 

I’ve always been very suspicious of the smooth flatness of a photograph and the kind of remove that it has from the actual texture of the world. It’s obviously a very clear representation in some respects, but it’s very far from reality because it is always so flat. But what you’re talking about also comes from what I know to be the case—that materials do things you don’t expect them to do. Ideas can be clean and precise; if an idea doesn’t get manifested in real form, you can keep imagining it as a perfect and pristine thing. But if you execute an idea in material form, usually the idea changes and gets rumbled up. It interests me when an idea is disrupted by what happens with material.

I noticed that the artworks are not titled. 

The pieces are titled just with numbers, “Tilt 1,” “Tilt 2,” etc., because I didn‘t want them to have any kind of narrative meaning. I just wanted the work to stand on its own in a factual way.

Okay. And not adding any interpretive or narrative element suggests to me that you don’t want the show to be taken as any kind of statement about Marquand itself.  Is that accurate?

I think that is accurate. And I think it’s partly because I don’t know if I have enough of a history or relationship to Marquand Chapel to feel like I’m in a position to make a statement about it. I hope the work can be an avenue through which other people can interpret Marquand and even get to a place of new meaning about it. But I was not a Divinity School student. I did not spend time there in the capacity that so many professors and students and others affiliated with the school do. I was a guest there, or maybe tourist is a better word.

A tourist of light?

Yes—in the sense that I was there for a bracketed amount of time, to do something very specific. I experienced something singular during those visits, and the cyanotypes are a record of that. 

Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. is a writer specializing in religion and the arts.