07 Shimmer Time
Public Artwork
2021
Commissioned by the City of North Vancouver and TransLink, this light-responsive work extends along the 100-metre tunnel at Lonsdale Quay, where travellers pass through on their daily ferry crossing between North Vancouver and Vancouver city centre. The work imagines the continuation of that crossing — the way light moves over water, creating a surface that is never the same twice. Passing through is to be briefly held inside a threshold: alive and ever changing.
Ferry passage between Lonsdale Quay and Vancouver
Water has an incredible effect on the mind. Looking at its changes, the way light passes over it, transforms it and is in a process of constant renewal has a calming effect on the mind. This points to soemthing called the Blue Mind Theory a concept coined by marine biologist Dr. Wallace J. Nichols. It describes the meditative, restorative state the brain enters when we are in, on, or near water. This state lowers stress, soothes the nervous system, and boosts mental clarity.
I wanted to bring this experience to the tunnel at Lonsdale Quay. Whether coming off the ferry from Vancouver or heading from North Vancouver over to Vancouver , I wanted to extend this experience, as if gazing out of the window onto the water.
I created a meditation based on this ferry journey and I captured it with an EEG brainwave reading device. This became the ‘wave’ from which the waveforms were created across the surface of the tunnel sculpture.
EEG Brainwave Reading device and capture
Original score of the sculpture