Ports of Auckland launches The Lightship.
The large-scale digital light wall on Quay Street provides Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland with a unique place for public art to be enjoyed.
The Lightship is a 110-metre-long, 13-metre-high light wall that wraps around the western façade of the port's new car handling building. It is made up of seven panels with nearly 8,500 individually programmable LED lights and is visible from busy Quay Street, city wharves, local buildings and the water.
The Lightship's inaugural commission is a new artwork by Janet Lilo entitled ISLOVE. Lilo's piece will be live from nightfall on Thursday 8 October until the first week of December 2020.
Janet Lilo works across digital video, photography, sculpture and installation. Her practice explores documentation as a conversational and social tool for recording time, people and place. Lilo often engages with forms of display common to global media and popular culture, such a neon signs and advertising billboards. She is a stalwart of public art, and her many interventions in the city space include the ever-popular banana lightboxes on Karangahape Road.
Lilo's work for The Lightship includes the phrase ISLOVE in multi-coloured block letters, spread across the seven giant light panels, interspersed with an evocative image of rippling waves.
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