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Applications for the Rhodes Scholarship 2027 are open!

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The Different Dream

Laura Sophie Wegner

Rhodes Scholar in Residence (Germany & Keble 2025)

A blacklight does not add anything to a face. It takes everything else away. The room disappears, the daylight version of a person disappears, and what is left glowing in the dark is the part you would never have noticed otherwise.

This is what draws me to the art. I paint skin with fluorescent pigment and photograph it under ultraviolet light, chasing the exact combination of colour, angle and light that pulls a person past their obvious expression. I am not really photographing a face. I am photographing the ambiguity, the perfect imperfection, the small contradictions that make someone unmistakably themselves and that usually stay hidden in plain sight.

The people who feel like home do the same thing for me. Having lived between several countries, I have come to feel most at home not in a place but with the people who see the parts of me that ordinary light leaves in the dark. Just as blacklight reveals what ordinary light cannot, home is the people and moments that illuminate who we really are.