Mikala Dwyer installing Weights of Light
Mikala Dwyer installing Weights of Light
Stories & Ideas

Mon 31 Oct 2022

Discombobulating sensations: Mikala Dwyer on Weights of Light

Art Behind the scenes Light: Works from Tate's Collection Meet the makers

Learn more about the enormous installation by Mikala Dwyer that has loomed over our museum's atrium during the Light: Works from Tate's Collection exhibition run.

I can't help but work big. When I try to work small, it just is a disaster. So the bigger the space the more comfortable I am.

My name is Mikala Dwyer I've made a big suspended sculpture for ACMI's atrium. The name of the work is 'Weights of Light' and it's made out of a plastic that is moulded and welded by hand. I have no idea what the shape will be; letting the material sort of make its own way and will you into a kind of submissive role of modelling. It becomes a very bodily intuition that you have to use to kind of sculpt with and it's amazing how that becomes translated into the end forms.

They're, you know, transparent sculptural forms, so the light is activated through your eyes moving through the object.

So it's a big massive volume. Your eyes will bounce back off it because of the highly reflective surface. There are a number of contradictions going on where your physical apprehension of an object like this is that it's taking you through it because your eyes are traveling through it like a lens.

But then on the other hand you're also stopping inside it as you inhabit this void and then you're also being repelled by it because it's a sort of a shiny object.

So there's lots of discombobulating sensations I think, going on.

I really liked to watch horror from a very early age. I read The Exorcist when I was about eleven. Always had an interest in the supernatural and the spooky. I think a kind of pleasure in thinking of the possibility that things aren't quite what they seem, you know, that there's another reality that's sitting tucked in our own.

Learn more about the work

You might also like