Illuminating insights into Lighting the Sound

Lighting the Sound has begun in Albany.

The coastline around King George Sound and night sky above it was transformed by colour from March 13 to 15 — as it will be again from March 20 to 22 and March 27 to 29.

The nine-night showing of Finnish light artist Kari Kola’s work, co-designed with local Menang Elders and the Albany community, is part of Albany 2026 bicentenary events, and the biggest light installation the world has ever seen.

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Before the first showing of the lights, journalist Vanessa Gould sat down with Kari Kola

For a man launching the world’s biggest lighting display on the undulating hills of Albany’s Torndirrup Peninsula, you could be forgiven for expecting, well, pyrotechnics.

But it turns out what famed Finnish light artist Kari Kola is up to is much more of a slow burn.

For a week, Albany residents and visitors had been watching mysterious lights appearing in the hills across from the town’s central business district, making the clouds glow an ominous green, punctured occasionally by long shards of white and red.

Kari and his core team in the Lighting the Sound project had been working from 7am to 2am on some nights, testing the lighting equipment from the 15 lighting towers perched on vantage points in almost impenetrable scrub.

His team is illuminating a 13km stretch of land for three weekends as the centrepiece of Albany’s bicentennial, Albany 2026.

After his last world record lighting installation in Connemara, Ireland, in 2020, Kola was approached by Perth cultural organisation FORM to do something even bigger across the water of Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour and King George Sound.

His inspiration came from extensive consultations with Albany’s Menang Noongar community, members of which scouted locations with him and inspired him with their knowledge of the land and its biodiversity.

“On the first site visit I tried to find a story line, a connection. I don’t do projects where there’s only light, and that’s it. There has to be a reason for it, and I only do site-specific work,” he says.

“I wanted to find a timeline that’s connecting all of these different times — ancient times, 200 years ago, the present, and maybe the future.”

It clicked into place when Menang elders introduced him to the bush food called blood root (a member of the kangaroo paw family) which in Albany grows with a bulbous and very spicy root. Blood root is so culturally important that the Menang people are named for it.

“That’s how I found the blood root,” says Kari. “I ate it, I took the colours for the project from the plant, I use only red and green. And yes, it is hot. It was OK, but it was very, very strong.

“This is connecting the language, it’s connecting the culture, it’s connecting the heritage, it’s connecting the land and the cosmos. So, the concept is we paint a very wide green panoramic area, and we create roots — red roots — to the sky.”

Kari notes he is trying to create “a very meditative moment, in a way, stillness”.

He explains that it is like one monumental picture: “The light is actually static, but it’s still full of dynamics, because we use the land and the sky as a canvas. The sky is never the same. You cannot take two photographs that are ever the same, the sky is changing all the time.

“If we have low clouds it will glow more with a lower ambience, if we have no clouds it will go up kilometres. So it is changing though nature.”

If past experience is anything to go by, he expects many of the 15,000 visitors the town expects to attract over each of the three-weekend events will come expecting “a traditional show” with a dazzling neon extravaganza and “a million different things”.

“But it’s more about the experience. I had an accident 20 years ago and I cracked my spine, and I had to learn how to walk again. And that actually changed my perspective and how I see things. Because I’ve been overactive since I was a kid,” he laughs.

“And then it was time to learn patience. Because I get bored very easily. So when you are walking 10 metres per hour you have time to experience what you see. And that changed my perspective of how I see things. I realised that if you have more time, you remember it in a very different way.

“I’ve been focusing on slowness for the last 20 years, and all my artistic focus has been on that.

“And (I know the audience will be) will be watching it and watching it wondering what’s going to happen. And then they realise it is happening, now. I’m here.

“You can just observe, and it’s enough.”

Kari traces his obsession with light and contrast to his life in Finland where there is only three hours of light a day in the depths of winter — and the temperature drops to minus 40C — and then 60 days in summer when the sun doesn’t set and it can reach 35C.

As a Finn with Russia as a neighbour, he is more aware than most of the perilous state of the world. He notes that as the “mass media and social media” make people feel “things are getting faster and faster, you have to do more and more”, he believes art, imagination and a love of humanity is the antidote.

“I think we should create more beautiful things and tell beautiful stories. Nowadays the world is going to chaos in multiple places.

“This kind of project on this kind of scale hopefully creates a moment of beauty in a way, a moment of stillness and maybe is a trigger that we should focus more on our culture and our heritage, on the good things.”