Natasha Johns-Messenger
LightWater 2025
led lights
LightWater is a light-based work using light to delineate water volume and motion in existing water bodies, which continues Johns-Messenger’s work testing the subtleties of perception in public space. Improvising and responding to the waterscape’s existing conditions, lights are installed near Erskine River Swing Bridge creating a slow growing enigma emerging as the natural light fades. The work prompts us to reflect on fundamental atmospheric elements such as light and water, and how our understanding and experience of the world can be shifted through these environmental conditions.
Natasha Johns-Messenger is an Australian/American installation artist and filmmaker based in Naarm/Melbourne and New York. With a primary interest in perception and site, she creates body-scaled architectural interventions, optical works, and site-determined film and photography. Her installations and public art projects develop from an intuitive approach to specific spaces through improvisational architecture—she highlights the framing and experience of space by working to disrupt or dissolve the distinction between a work and its context. Sometimes, these site-determined spatial installations activate an experience of perceptual paradox by employing a complex system of optical physics and material conundrums. Other works respond more subtly, extracting subject matter and formal qualities from the space in which they are exhibited.
Johns-Messenger completed a Master of Fine Arts in Film at Columbia University, New York (2012), and a Masters by Research in Fine Art at RMIT (2000). She has exhibited widely internationally, including in Italy, Japan, Columbia, China, The Netherlands, Taiwan and USA. Selected projects and exhibitions include AXIS, Strange Engine, Melbourne (2023); Envelop, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery (2021); Somewhere Other, La Biennale di Venezia, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition (2018); Water-Orb, Ian Potter Sculpture Court Commission, Monash University Museum of Art (2018); Sitelines, Heide Museum of Modern Art (2016); and Threefold, El Museo de Los Sures, New York, United States (2015). Notable public works include Compass, Southern Way McClelland Commission (2023); Alterview 2013 for Hunters Point HS/IS 404, New York; and This Side In commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund in 2009. Johns-Messenger won the Rabbobank Den Haag Sculpture Prize in The Netherlands (2007), and the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture with Open Spatial Workshop (2005).
This project was generously supported by sponsors Dan and Liza Wollmering, Glyn Davis and Margaret Gardner, Ute and Dieter Martin, and Lorne Friendship Group (Barry and Pam Fradkin, Erica and Harry Frydenberg, Jennifer and Greg Goodman, Gary and Livia Jackson, Harry and Carol Kamien, Frank and Mim Tisher, John and Lynette Zalcberg), and assisted by Swing Bridge Café.
Images: Natasha Johns-Messenger, SoftTime 2024, Monash University Museum of Art and Monash Public Art Commissions (top). Photo Chirstian Capurro; Natasha Johns-Messenger (bottom). Photo Jacqueline Mitelman. Courtesy the artist.
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