by Warren Langley
Kindilan Underpass, Beverly Hills
It was important to be me that this was an artwork that didn’t require you to pause; it was about an experience of walking through it.
Warren Langley’s Wolli transforms Kindilan underpass in Beverly Hills into an experiential lighting sculpture. It is inspired by the nearby Wolli Creek, and attempts to capture the beauty of sunlight reflecting off its rippling water.
Pure white light emanates from carved polycarbonate blades that are suspended from the ceiling. The blades meander through the underpass, gently curving like the natural flow of the creek. Each blade represents a ripple effect, creating a sense of movement through the underpass.
Langley says "putting an artwork in there, particularly a light-based work, really can activate the space and just change it. It was important to me that this was an artwork that didn’t require you to pause. It was about an experience of walking through it."
The artist worked with the local community to draw out their stories and relationships to Wolli Creek. A competition was held with the St George Photographic Society where the community was invited to create imagery that shows how the natural environment shapes their experience. The artwork responds to these community interpretations of Wolli Creek, providing meaning to their lived experience of place.
Light art and glass art are terms commonly applied to the site-specific public art of artist Warren Langley. In a career spanning over 35 years, the past 16 years has seen an increasing use of light as a principal design element to create public art interventions which undergo day to night transformations.
Langley’s ouvre addresses the notion of sight/site, both visual and contextual and his 35-year portfolio of artworks for the built environment span all manner of materials although it is his large scale works in light and glass for which he is most well-known.
These have involved major projects in locations as diverse as the Australian Parliament House; the Maison de la Opera, Amiens, France; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tacoma, USA, the Australian Pavilion at the 2011 Shanghai World Expo and Hong Kong airport. This body of work has been delivered for a broad range of government, corporate and private clients concerned with the commissioning of artworks specific to site.
In 1996 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts and has been afforded international recognition for many large-scale works using glass and light as preferred materials. In 2010 he was a finalist, in the Art in the Working Place category at the International Architecture Symposium in Barcelona. These public artworks integrate and intervene with the built environment as a site-specific component and increasingly his work blurs the boundaries between sculpture, architecture and engineering.
All of Langley’s projects are delivered as a design, fabricate, deliver and install package and utilise the skills of a team of engineer’s, project managers, industrial designers and fabricators who underpin his public art projects. Together, this team has developed a reputation for reliability, ability to deliver unfailingly on time, problem solve on all levels of a project and competently involve themselves with all manner of colleagues, stakeholders, consultants and other professionals.
These resources have been designed by experienced Visual Arts educators to support students and teachers studying and delivering the NSW syllabus for Visual Arts, and are tailored to Stage 4 and Stage 5.
Stage 6 teachers may also consider some of the artist studies for their students.
