World-renowned Finnish light artist Kari Kola will make his Australian debut in March next year with Lighting the Sound, a monumental project in Albany anticipated to be the largest outdoor light installation on earth. Co-designed and led by the Albany community and local Menang Elders, the open-air, after-dark experience is set to illuminate landforms around King George Sound, including the hills of Torndirrup National Park, Vancouver Peninsula and the ocean – a source of ancestral, cultural, ecological and historical significance. Taking place over three weekends, the light spectacular will be visible for four hours at night, revealing the beauty of Albany’s landscape, illuminated like never before. 

Kola is celebrated for illuminating major landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Connemara Mountains in Ireland, and vulnerable sites such as historical castles and Stonehenge, as well as illuminating Snowhenge, an icy replica of Stonehenge in Finland, reproduced exactly to scale. In Perth for further collaboration prior to the launch of Lighting the Sound, and in the relative warmth of Western Australia in comparison to his homeland in Finland, the artist was suffering from a particularly bad case of the flu. “I know,” he says. “It’s surprising for me also.” Despite this setback, Kola is keen to talk about the project and puts the actual size of the massive installation in perspective. “It covers about 10 million square metres,” he says. “It’s about a 15 kilometre-wide light installation on a landscape, roughly the size of 1400 full-size soccer fields.” 

He says the local community and businesses are heavily involved in the project. “They’re the specialists with knowledge of the landscape and how to work with it, like working around the prevalence of snakes for example,” he says.  On the technical side, there’s a local scaffolding company involved to erect 15 steel towers, and then there’s a power company arranging the power. “I will bring only two of my own guys from Finland,” he says. “And then we have six helpers on the technical buildup focusing on just getting the lights up there – we need to get in about 850 light sources.” Kola says it will take five days to install the project. “It’s going to be a logistical challenge,” he says, “but I think we have all the pieces of the puzzle right.” 

Research was key in preparation for the project with Kola exploring both the colonial and Indigenous history of the area. He also looked closely at the landscape. “It started from the ground itself,” he says. “When I saw the bay area for the first time, it was clear that this was the spot, but what would be the content? I did lots of research and talked with local Aboriginal people about the history and about the land. And then I heard about the plant that’s called Menang, the same name as the local First Nations people. So for me, that was actually the trigger for this project.” 

“We found the plant with the help of an Aboriginal guide, tasted it and read about it. For me it became clear that this is actually what’s combining everything here. The plant lives only in that area. It doesn’t live anywhere else on the planet.” 

Using the plant as inspiration, Lighting the Sound will include green beams to symbolically depict the plant and red beams to represent its roots. “It’s been inspiring to realise the knowledge of the Aboriginal culture and their connection with the land to create something like this,” he says. 

Kola says he’s been interested in light for as long as he can remember. “Light is everywhere and it affects the world and our daily lives in many ways. Being from Finland, the autumn and winters last long and these seasons are very dark. I wanted to teach myself to use light to be able to utilise the darkness that surrounds me during those seasons. That’s why I became a light artist.”

One certainty is Lighting the Sound will be a slow experience. “It might look like an aurora if we have low clouds,” he says, “but it’s really changing through nature. There’s the water, there’s clouds, there’s the wind, there’s the rain. I try to create calmness through it. I believe in slowness – that it’ll also leave a very different kind of memory mark.”

“For me it is respectful and it changes the idea of time. I hope people will realise that when they watch this artwork spend time with it.”

Lighting the Sound, presented by FORM and the Albany 2026 Program. is on show on Albany’s coastline from 13-15, 20-22 and 27-29 March 2026.