Lighting’s magic man

5 March, 2010

James Turrell is every lighting designer’s hero. A key reason is that he achieves what every lighting designer aspires to accomplish: a perfect marriage of light, space and architecture. He is artist and conjurer, melting the light, both natural and artificial, into its spatial boundaries to create a memorable and mesmerising effect.

When Turrell exhibited in New York some years ago, several people were so taken in by the illusions of light that they tripped over the beams and fell to the floor. One casualty apparently sued Turrell for her resultant broken wrist. ‘Her testimony was that I had created a blue wall, but when she leaned against the blue wall it wasn’t there. It was made of light.’

He is occasionally ambitious in the scale of his creations. His famous work-in-progress is the Roden Crater in Arizona, the epic transformation of a natural volcanic crater – he bought it in 1977 – into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed to view celestial phenomena. It is a complex and elaborate version of his Skyspace concept, two examples of which are in Yorkshire and Northumbria, his only permanent UK works.

‘I wanted a bowl shape at the top so that the top actually shapes the sky and gives a dome-shape form,’ he said in a BBC feature. ‘I liked that it was on the western edge of the Painted Desert… in this stage set of geologic time, I wanted to build these spaces that engage celestial events, kind of making music with a series of light.’

His latest installation at the Wolfsburg Art Museum in northern Germany is his largest-ever gallery work and continues his exploration of artificial coloured light. The Wolfsburg Ganzfeld Piece is 12m high and encompasses an area of 700 sq m. It comprises two rooms, Viewing Space and Sensing Space, which merge into each other. Both are empty but saturated with slowly changing coloured light.

The effect is created using Zumtobel LED fittings: 250 Hilio LED light lines and 24 Olympus LED spotlights fitted with more than 30,000 LEDs. These allow more than 65,000 different brightness levels and millions of colours, controlled by a DMX control system.

Around 30 other exhibits are also on display, including models of rooms inside Roden Crater, and installations from each of his main bodies of work: among them a new version of Wedgework V and Spinther 2007, from his Tall Glass Pieces. The latter, a white frosted-glass panel backlit by more than 15,000 LEDs, is another collaboration with Zumtobel. The individual light points are not visible, dissolving and flowing into hundreds of millions of colour impressions.

Six LED colours are used – red, green, blue, yellow, white and bright white – all carefully selected within the colour groups to ensure they had identical characteristics in terms of spectral quality and light quantity.

Each LED can be controlled separately, again to more than 65,000 brightness levels each, using a specially developed five-channel control system.

According to Zumtobel, the colour intensity and saturation is ‘unprecedented’.