liquid light
‘a light pour’ and ‘some kind of wonderful’ appeared at the 2007 Melbourne Design Festival and in the F.U.E.L Collection and Design Within Reach during Design Philadelphia 2007 ‘liquid sky’, was a commission by the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery to exhibit a design proposal based on the Port Phillip Bay shore of the peninsula.
installation | water + light
drought nature technology
by little wonder : gyungju chyon + john stanislav sadar
water magic
water or by the ever-changing movement of the air, often fades from our attention in our highly-managed existence. To appreciate the joy of the uncontrollable vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the natural world is to move ourselves one step closer to reconciling ourselves with it. It is in this spirit that little wonder ’s recent installation projects have recognised and amplified small moments of our everyday environment hitherto taken for granted. The works marry sophisticated optical fibre and water-jet cutting to mundane, inconspicuous, everyday items such as baking cups and roller-blinds, elevating everyday phenomena from rain to light on the water. The works are distinctly urban, bringing these phenomena into the realm of the designed world.
As manifest in the global extremes in weather over recent years, whether Australian droughts, Canadian ice storms or rampant flooding, our current ecological problems are symptomatic of a general estrangement from nature. Our relationship to the world is technologically mediated; the world is seen as increasingly something that happens to us, as something increasingly at odds with us, rather than as our home. The designed world shapes and reinforces this, from the cinematic isolation of our automobiles which remove our bodies from the physical demands of travel, reducing the immediate environment to mere imagery, to the managerial aspect of our buildings which divorce us from fluctuations of light, air movement and humidity in favour of a standardised indoor climate. The designed world is a product of this estrangement while also embodying and propagating it, leaving both designers and public alike distanced from the world around them. To recognise the ecological crisis requires an awareness and appreciation of natural phenomena. The simple luxury of experience offered by the magic of light dancing on the undulating surface of
‘a light pour’ was installed on a transparently-enclosed barge floating on Melbourne’s Yarra River as one of three floating water palaces. It was a single illuminated cloud of white baking cups, from which dropped a plethora of hand-crimped optical fibres, creating a cascade of light. Illuminator sponsored by Optical Fibre and LED Lighting.
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weather matters: On Site review 21
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