Created during the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, this light installation responds to the constraints and improvisations of its time. With supply chains disrupted and access to specialist materials limited, the artists turned to the humble offerings of the local hardware store: reed screen fencing and garden truss. The work embraces resourcefulness as an aesthetic principle.
Installed within the atmospheric industrial tunnels of the Coal Loader Environmental Centre, the piece transforms everyday materials into a luminous, textural surface. Light filters through the woven reeds and structural lattice, casting shifting patterns that echo the site’s layered history, from its past as a working industrial facility to its present role as a place of community, ecology, and renewal.
The work invites viewers to slow down, observe, and reflect on the ways creativity adapts under pressure. It stands as both a product of its moment and a quiet celebration of resilience, collaboration, and the beauty that can emerge from constraint.
Artist: Ruth McDermott and Ben Baxter
Date: Covid 2022
Medium: Reed screen fencing and garden truss, RGB LED light
Dimension: 6m x 2m
Site location: Coal Loader North Sydney
Commissioned by: North Sydney Council
Special thanks: Director Mike Day and Sponsor 32 Hundred
