Midnight Sun - illuminated outdoor painting

A project that has been in development for some time now, is the newly opened Midnight Sun, an illuminated outdoor painting by artist Sara Hughes.

Comprising of 96 individual panels of glass, which together create a total of 260 square meters, the artwork is suspended above the former Willow Street bus shelter and wraps around the wall and front of Tauranga Art Gallery to Wharf Street creating a beautiful corridor of coloured light for central city-dwellers.

This artworks seemingly simple execution belies its technical complexity. First, Hughes commissioned Tauranga photographer Anne Shirely to capture every sunset for a month over the winter solstice/Matariki. Her painted response to those photographs were overlaid onto the original images and printed onto vinyl in multiple carefully mapped out layers to create depth and varying opacity. The sun shines through the vinyl by day casting colourful shadows on the bus stop floor and by night the bus stop is lit to mimic dusk sunlight by illumination specialists Techlight.

When artworks are scanned and translated onto new substrates, it is important that the outcome is as true to the original as possible. But our team of expert printers were up for the challenge and the results speak for themselves.

“Midnight Sun is about a sunset that never sets, it's about holding on to that feeling you get watching a sun sink toward the horizon” – Sara Hughes.

The opening of the artwork featured on 7 sharp, check it out here: https://fb.watch/dV8vxa6Hzu/