Luminary I Luminare Ōtautahi I Christchurch
A sculptural installation and photographic series by Karen Sewell
Luminary I Luminare is a sculptural and photographic installation by Karen Sewell, exploring the metaphor of light and light-giving bodies. Presented in partnership with the University of Otago and Northart Gallery, the work invites a dialogue between contemporary art, spirituality, and the unseen.
“Luminary | Luminare invites us to contemplate the mystery, the interdependence, and the wonder of things.”
— Professor Murray Rae, The University of Otago
Exhibition Statement
Luminary I Luminare was exhibited at Palazzo Bembo, Venice, as part of the European Cultural Centre’s exhibition Personal Structures, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale (2022). At the same time, Luminary I Luminare toured Aotearoa New Zealand in a site-specific iteration that brought together sculpture, photography, light, sound, and video within an immersive, multi-media installation.
The New Zealand tour included three distinctive and historically significant sites of worship:
– St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, New Zealand’s only entirely stone cathedral.
– Oxford Terrace Baptist Church, Christchurch, an architecturally award-winning contemporary worship space built to replace the original church destroyed in the earthquakes.
– St John’s in the City, Wellington, a gothic-style wooden heritage building—one of only three of its kind in Wellington.
Presenting Luminary I Luminare across these sacred and architectural contexts, while it was simultaneously on view in Venice, opened a cross-cultural dialogue between two connected projects—each exploring relationships between contemporary art, faith, and spaces of devotion.
Karen Sewell’s use of everyday materials foregrounded an encounter between the material and the intangible. Her photographic works comprised lumen prints made at dawn, transforming ordinary elements—such as polystyrene balls from a children’s model solar-system kit—into celestial bodies hovering in deep space. The resulting compositions evoked both the cosmos and early symbolic depictions of the solar system.
The installation’s sound component was composed from NASA Voyager recordings made in deep space around the planets and moons of our solar system. When decoded, these transmissions revealed the enigmatic and haunting “music of the spheres.”
Sewell’s fascination with levitation and lightness—forms suspended and appearing to hover—drew on ideas of ascension, transcendence, and the conduits between the material and ethereal realms. Her work invited viewers to look and feel beyond the physical, to enter a space of wonder, stillness, and possibility.
A video element, including time-lapse footage of the installation of Luminary I Luminare at Palazzo Bembo, Venice, accompanied the presentation and extended the work’s meditation on light, movement, and transformation.
Introduction
by Professor Murray Rae, The University of Otago
Co-Presenter of Luminary | Luminare
It is the work of artists, and their gift, to assist us in apprehending the world with fresh eyes, to discern meaning and connections we had not suspected, to attend to the spirit present in all things. Artists may direct our gaze to small and intricate things—a face, for example, upon which can be seen, if we look with care, traces of pain, or love, or both at once. They may draw our attention to the unfathomable depths of suffering, to the agonies and joys of the human soul, or to the immensities of time and space.
Karen Sewell’s Luminary | Luminare extends such an invitation—an invitation to contemplate the mystery, the interdependence, and the wonder of things. It invites us to consider the expansive, uncontainable giving forth of light and sound in the cosmos, to wonder at the capacity given to us to be and see and hear, and to contemplate the source from which light and sound come.
The integration of two-dimensional photographic works with the shimmering flux of the three-dimensional sphere, suspended in sacred space and shrouded in a translucent veil, calls for sustained attentiveness. The work of art, along with the world and its Creator, resists all the efforts of our intellect to confine, to circumscribe, or to fully comprehend. There is always more—to be seen from another vantage point, to emerge with the shifting frequencies of light and sound, and to be received as gift when we are suitably attentive.
The exhibition space itself is deliberately chosen. Luminary | Luminare was located in places where prayers have been said, where choirs have sung, and where people have gathered before to contemplate the light that comes into the world and which the darkness cannot overcome. Luminary speaks of divine light and of the spirit mediated through material things. It is both expansive and intimate; it presents us with the vastness of time and space and yet invites the viewer and the listener into the still repose of a contemplative soul.
Oxford Terrace Baptist Church, Ōtautahi I Christchurch
Oxford Terrace Baptist Church in Christchurch was chosen for its architectural renewal and symbolic resilience. The contemporary worship space, completed after the destruction of the original church in the 2011 earthquakes, embodies both loss and regeneration. The design’s play of natural light through clean modern lines provides an ideal setting for Luminary I Luminare, aligning its themes of illumination, transformation, and spiritual continuity with the city’s story of recovery and hope.
List of Works
Installation
Luminary | Luminare, 2022
Sculptural installation — custom sphere, Amaike organza mesh, helium, air, light, sound (Source: NASA)
Exhibition Lumen Prints
1. Solar Portal, 2022
Giclée print from lumen negative, wooden frame, Ed. of 10
640 × 790 mm
2. Solar Portal IV, 2022
Giclée print from lumen negative, wooden frame, Ed. of 10
640 × 790 mm
3. Sunbow 3, 2022
Giclée print from lumen negative, wooden frame, Ed. of 10
640 × 790 mm
Lumen Prints for SWAP Project / Silent Auction
Unique handmade photographic prints — Ilford fibre-based paper, unframed
203 × 220 mm
Luminary Exhibition Publication – Venice / New Zealand
Available at exhibition venues $25 Online $30 https://linktr.ee/Karensewell
Process for Making Lumen Prints
These lumen works are created through different processes. Some begin as negatives – photograms produced in the darkroom with light and objects – while others are direct contact prints made in the light of dawn and daybreak.
Many factors influence the final outcome: the objects and negatives, the time of day, the changing weather, and how these conditions interact with the chemistry of the paper.
Swap Project
Light exchanged, community sustained
The Swap Project installation, Oxford Terrace Baptist Church, Otautahi, Christchurch 2022
The Swap Project – Oxford Terrace, Christchurch
Luminary | Luminare artist Karen Sewell donated a set of unique original lumen prints to each venue of her New Zealand tour.
At Oxford Terrace Baptist Church in Christchurch, these beautiful lumen prints could be swapped in exchange for non-perishable food items or cash donations.
All contributions went to the Delta Community Support Trust Foodstore, supporting their ongoing work within the local community.
Luminary | Luminare Oxford Terrace – Video
Experience the light, sound, and spatial resonance of Luminary | Luminare at Oxford Terrace Baptist Church through moving image documentation. The video reveals the work’s unfolding dialogue between light, architecture, and the ecclesiastical resonance of this sacred space. VIDEO COMING SOON
