Creating spaces with light

Olafur Eliasson

Light is magical stuff. It can change how you feel, give the impression of safety (or danger), demarcate space, decorate it or completely change it. It leaves no trace, can cost a fortune to set up and is difficult to do well... but when it is, it delivers an unrivalled impact.

Yayoi Kusama

In events, when presented with an unhelpfully large, unattractive or somehow difficult space there is a tendency to either do as little as possible (rope off the problem) or to spend a fortune literally building a room within a room. But we like to think there is a third option: creating a space with light.

Bruce Munro

It doesn't have to involve a lot of lights, sometimes one well placed piece of lighting can change a whole room:

Conrad Shawcross

Anila Quayyum Agha

Sometimes light changes the idea of a room, like Katie Paterson's light bulb which perfectly replicates the spectrum, temperature and amperage of the light of a full moon...

Katie Paterson

Sometimes a simple trick changes everything, like Olafur Eliasson's Model for a Timeless Garden, where he sets a strobe light onto a series of water features, creating a series of otherworldly snapshots of water frozen in time:

It works on the most inherently unattractive spaces...

Liz West

... making the mundane otherworldly and exciting.

Bill FitzGibbons

Ivan Navarro

It can deliver messages, imbuing a sense of significance:

Jung Lee

Rob Montgomery

Jung Lee

And of course it can section off space.

Ehlenberger

Massimo Uberti

Jeongmoon Chi

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall

Oh and don't forget projection mapping, which doesn't have to be irredeemably naff (though mostly it is).

Agathe de Bailliencourt

Vivid Sydney

Antivj

So the next time you're stuck looking at an unprepossessing space, think twice about how to deal with it. Or call us, and we'll do it for you.