Join us from 5pm on Thursday 15 October to celebrate the presentation of Bronte’s sculpture The Way the Light Hits the Building in the Canberra Airport atrium.

About the Exhibition

The Way the Light Hits the Building considers glass as a material that shapes how space is seen, divided and understood. Moving between transparency and reflection, the work draws attention to the way glass can frame a view, separating one space from another while allowing vision to pass through.

The installation takes the form of an enclosed structure made from large sheets of glass, with apertures opening through each wall. These openings create shifting sightlines across and through the work, framing partial views of the surrounding architecture and of other bodies moving nearby. From different positions, the apertures align and overlap, creating layered views that continually recompose the space around the work.

Bodies, light and architecture are framed, distorted and layered across surfaces. Large surfaces hold and divide the surrounding environment, creating a structure that sits somewhere between sculpture and architecture. Light moves across the glass and catches its edges, while bodies and surrounding forms are layered through multiple planes. The work asks the viewer to negotiate both what lies beyond the glass and the material itself: its weight, surface, scale and capacity to establish boundaries. In this way, the work shifts between transparency and obstruction, interior and exterior, openness and enclosure.
Glass is so embedded within contemporary architecture that its presence can easily go unnoticed. The Way the Light Hits the Building brings attention back to this familiar material and to the quiet ways it organises perception, movement and spatial boundaries.

In this presentation, the work sits within the public and transitional space of an airport, where glass, reflection, thresholds and directed movement already play a significant role in shaping experience. Surrounded by people continually arriving, departing and passing through, the installation draws the architecture around it into the work, making the changing movement, light and activity of the space part of how it is seen.