North Vancouver public-art installation earns international design award
Visual artist Jill Anholt’s Sea Change wins CODAawards’ transportation category
Sea Change.
A NORTH VANCOUVER public-art installation has just won a CODAaward, one of three Canadian projects to earn recognition in the global competition.
Winners across 10 categories as well as two People’s Choice Awards were announced September 1.
Jill Anholt’s Sea Change is an interactive light-based artwork within a bus-exchange transit tunnel that connects to the City of North Vancouver’s SeaBus terminal. A pedestrian and cyclist trail travels directly through the outer edge of this underpass, connecting to the North Shore’s Spirit Trail.
Prior to the installation, the 34-year-old tunnel was dark and unappealing. The goal was to use light to make it more inviting and visually dynamic.
Anholt, who is an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, worked with Arup lighting designers Janelle Drouet and Yuliya Savelyeva and metal fabricator/installer Richard Thacker Works for the piece, commissioned by North Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with Polygon Promenade.
They created a watery effect with a series of LED lights that reflect light patterns off textured mirror-polished stainless-steel panels.
When the tunnel is empty, the artwork casts a gentle shifting of turquoise hues, but when people enter into it, a wave of intense blue or green light is triggered, rippling across the wall in front of them.
The work celebrates the area’s connection to its waterfront and speaks to the importance of water to humanity.
“During our team’s research for this project, we uncovered a historic map that showed the original water’s edge of North Vancouver from a hundred years ago running right along our project site, which provided the main inspiration for the artwork,” Anholt said in a statement. “Our team conducted multiple experiments within the actual tunnel space and in our studios, bouncing light off different materials as a reference to the refraction qualities of light traveling through water. Our explorations eventually achieved a similar effect by reflecting light off textured mirror polish stainless steel panels. From here we moved onto more formal optic and geometric studies and prototyping both analog and digitally to create an artwork that could achieve the immersive and interactive effects we were after yet could also be installed around the many existing obstacles and design constrains within the space.
“During our installation and commissioning process, we tweaked the sequencing and timing of the lighting effect to allow it to work very closely with viewer movement using motion sensors at either end of the installation and to achieve a softer shimmery ‘resting state’ when not activated,” she said.
CODAWorx, a global online community that celebrates design projects featuring commissioned artworks, organizes CODAawards. Now in its eighth year, the international art and design competition recognizes outstanding projects that integrate commissioned art into interior, architectural, or public spaces.
Canada represented nine percent of the top 100 finalists this year, the others being from Edmonton and Toronto.
Sea Change was also recently honoured with an IES award (Illuminating Engineering Society) for 2021.
To see the full list of winners, see CODAWorx.
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