Luminous Territory was a site specific installation unique to its Canary Wharf setting, as part of Summer Lights, 2022. The materials draw from the language of urban transformation: timber studding and scaffolding netting. A new and specific aesthetic emerges from the careful arrangement of these materials assembled into structural propositions echoing the surrounding built environment of Canary Wharf.

The rectilinear timber frameworks are painted in black bitumen. Each section wrapped in scaffolding netting. This netting comes in a wide variety of colours, with a different colour often being chosen by specific construction companies. As the viewer moves around the layered forms, panels of netting overlap and the colours of the semi-transparent nettings mix and shift, becoming transparent and then opaque by turns. Natural light filters through, creating shadows that change colour as the sun moves through the sky.

Choreographer Angela Woodhouse and I developed an accompanying performance that synthesises movement/ dance with architectural forms constructed from materials resonant of the built or urban environment. One of the themes that emerged is the notion of transience as populations filter through the landscape. This is supported by the current questions of evolution as historically expressed through the drive to build more and consume, and which now need adjusting in the shadow of the climate emergency. We see the performance as an engine that tries to resist collapse but inevitably burns itself out. We will addressed the formal questions of energy through expansion of the space, through repetition, through waves of activity, through gravity and stillness, through meeting and re-forming.