It's lights, camera and serious action as the red desert morphs into a delicate and huge web of glowing colours each night at Field of Light Uluru. Designed by renowned British artist Bruce Munro, and named Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku or ‘looking at lots of beautiful lights’ in local Pitjantjatjara language, this dazzling light spectacle is currently the largest of its kind to date – promising a truly incredible viewing of the nation’s most important rock.
Bigger than seven football fields, this network of 50,000 colourful, swaying spindles was dreamt up by Munro when he first travelled around the outback in his early 20s. The artwork was installed in consultation with the Anangu people in 2016 and was indefinitely extended after its hugely successful original run ended in March 2017.
As dusk falls, the dark desert transforms into the perfect canvas for this mesmerising installation, spread out at the base of Uluru. Each solar-powered stem is crowned with a frosted-glass sphere that beams in a desert spectrum of ochre, deep violet, blue and gentle white. You can weave through the Field of Light at your own pace, stopping to admire the incandescent lights, as they twinkle like the night sky.
Munro said: “Field of Light was one idea that landed in my sketchbook and kept on nagging at me to be done. I saw in my mind a landscape of illuminated stems that, like the dormant seed in a dry desert, quietly wait until darkness falls, under a blazing blanket of southern stars, to bloom with gentle rhythms of light. Field of Light is a personal symbol for the good things in life.”
Munro dedicated more than 2,800 hours to designing and building Field of Light in the UK, and an additional 3,900 hours were spent bringing it to life at Uluru. In other words, it’s a truly once-in-a-lifetime art experience set in a truly once-in-a-lifetime destination.