Commissioned by the Perth International Arts Festival, Lightsite is a collapsible room-sized pinhole camera which was erected in a number of sites throughout the Fitzgerald Bioregion in Western Australia in 2006. Lightsite was conceived by Ian Weir as a means of celebrating a variety of individuals and their families who have a very strong sense of connection to the landscapes in the region. The camera and the photographs captured inside it were exhibited in regional galleries throughout Western Australia for a two-year period, concluding at the Western Australian Museum in 2007. The project was again featured in the Fotofreo International Photography Festival, in Fremantle WA.
Importantly Lightsite does not have a floor, enabling it to be erected over an existing landscape and then occupied by that landscape’s residents via a light-proof door. Daylight can only enter the room via a small aperture and so the external world is projected inside the room in an inverted position illuminating the occupants and interior landscape at the same time. In this way the physical landscape and the inhabitant of that landscape are both contained within the site of the room – revealed ‘in-situ’ through the agency of light.
Lightsite was produced in collaboration with Mix Artists and Gondwana Link and was part facilitated by funding from the Regional Arts Fund [for RGR].
