White Night Auckland, Auckland Arts Festival 2017

Text, sound, and light installation

Polished steel, blue light, audio skylark song

Strange Joy is drawn from Isaac Rosenberg’s poem, Returning we hear the Larks, and comprises laser-cut sentences attached to fine cables. Each of the 16 strands holds one line of the poem. The lines are suspended from branches of a tree and anchored into the ground. The cut-out sentences are delicate and their movement in the breeze causes light reflections to run up and down the sentences. As darkness fell the sentences were flooded in blue light. The audio component is created from Skylark recordings transmitted through speakers placed in a black birdcage and also suspended from the tree.