Night River Signals
Category
Excerpt

A project in the Loddon River, southeast Australia, where a kinetic sculpture instrument allows a turbine to animate a light source to produce long exposure night photographs. The flexibility of the long drawing wire enables the light to delicately reflect variations and bouncing in the flow, never repeating.

As the flood waters drop, the sculpture is installed in a place in the river that feels right for the aesthetic and the practicalities of making photographs at night. Stones are moved around to create space for the turbine and direct flow to produce some mechanical energy without damaging the ecosystem.

The long exposure photographs are made using intuitive time scales from 9sec - 692 sec - 11.5min, with an average time of 6 minutes.

Rather than using a stopwatch, I chose durations such as number of rotations of the instrument, time taken to adjust the instrument and clamber back over rocks to the camera, time taken for hot tea, certain star and cloud movements, or pure feeling and intuition. All of these photos are made in the light of the half moon on the nights 27 and 28 august 2020