Client: Main Roads WA
Location: Port Hedland, Australia
Completion date: 2015
Artwork budget: $1,200,000
Project Team
Other
Steve Kennelly
Light Application
Artist
Stuart Green
Stuart Green Artist
Other
Robin Orton
Main Roads Western Australia
Overview
Night falling is a 17m tall curved triangular section tapered steel form set on a curved concrete plinth. Three lines of Programmed LEDs illuminate the surface. The work is located at the intersection of Great Northern Highway and the turn off to South Hedland.
Lingering Horizon is the illumination of the north and south bridge beams of the Great Northern Highway flyover for Wilson Street Port Hedland and uses programmed LED lighting across the 40m spans.
Goals
Night Falling and Lingering Horizon are paired Artworks just outside Port Hedland, Western Australia. Renowned for its harsh and extreme weather the region comes alive each evening as the heat recedes and colour intensifies in the darkening sky. Commissioned through Main Roads WA for the Great Northern Highway Realignment the sculpture (Night Falling) and the illuminated bridge beams (Lingering Horizon) use lighting, that keeps track with the huge tidal range of the area, to extend the colour experience of this location.
Night Falling projects stylised evening skies with lightened horizon lines that slide up and down the structure in time with the 6m plus tides of the area to create a visually poetic tide indicator.
The artworks act as landmarks for the approaches to Port and South Hedland acting as arrival and journey markers. They take as subject matter the poetic and ephemeral in the landscape to create a new richer reading of the locality which is often only associated with the industrial.
Process
Artist Stuart Green worked on a number of artwork and infrastructure concepts that addressed the character of location and road travel. The artist worked with John Holland Group and Main Roads to test these concepts before the local community and to choose a way forward. With the final developed concepts the artist worked with Light Application lighting consultants and Living Iron fabricators to realize the complex artworks.
Lighting functionality can be remotely operated to override normal lighting shows with the colour warning codes giving notice of approaching cyclones which are a yearly event in this location.