physical, visual and environmental art by Lachlan Turczan
There’s a moment in Lachlan Turczan’s work where the setting changes – a desert at dawn, a mangrove reserve at night or a gallery in Milan – and viewers soon realize that what they’re looking at is moving light. It has volume and stands in the air like a wall or column, and when they move towards it, it responds, flowing like water but transparent like a thin, translucent fabric. From here, the realization comes: light can behave like matter, and Lachlan Turczan has mastered the ways in which it bends, shifts and dances.
The Los Angeles-based artist’s practice lies in the space between physics, optics and the environment artas he works with lasers, water, fog and custom-made lenses to produce sculptures made entirely of light. Of materials read like a physics experiment – acrylic optics, stainless steel, sensors, mud, steam – but the experience his work creates is closer to standing inside a weather system than one installation because viewers don’t just see the pieces come to life, they walk through them, immersing them in an interactive environment.
all images courtesy of Lachlan Turczan
sculptures using lasers, sensors, acrylics and custom lenses
The question of when light ceased to be a medium and became a material is one that Lachlan Turczan often returns to. It appears in his Veil series, a collection of field pieces made alone or with small groups, often at night, in locations that already held natural phenomena. Veil II was built in the Mojave Desert at dawn, where steam rising from natural hot springs meets cold air and creates its own atmosphere. THE artist he arrived an hour before sunrise, set up laser projectors in the vapor field and watched as the rays split the moisture into magenta and blue clouds, using the same physics that creates a rainbow, produced on an intimate, human scale. There’s also Veil III, which occurred during a storm on the banks of a creek in Sea Ranch, California.
The moment his batteries died and he had to pack up, Lachlan Turczan describes it as waking up from a dream, with the weather and light merging so completely. These field experiments fed directly into studio practice and the larger commissions that followed. Light Object, a 2026 studio work, distilled outdoor phenomena in a controlled environment as a sculpture that uses lasers, water, sensors, acrylics and custom lenses specifically to understand the mechanics well enough to scale them. It became the direct precursor to Lucida, the sculpture that first appeared in 2025, made of laser projectors, acrylic lenses, stainless steel and custom software that reads sensor data from participants. As a person moves through the mist-filled beams, the light bends, reacts around them, and changes as it enters it.
Aldwa Alsael, which translates to liquid light, was commissioned by The Noor Riyadh Light Art Festival
Landscape art where choreography happens through physics
What Lachlan Turczan said about participation is that choreography is done through physics, not instruction. The project creates conditions that provoke curiosity and then trusts people to bring their own curiosity to meet it. Aldwa Alsael, commissioned by the Noor Riyadh Light Art Festival in 2024, shows the same principle on an architectural scale, with three steel lighthouses standing along the shore of Wadi Hanifah, a seasonal river valley, casting rays into the water every night. From a certain angle along the banks, the beams converge into parallel lines that appear to rise as solid pillars of light, and this phenomenon is known as morphing, or an optical phenomenon where a distorted image becomes unique from a certain angle.
Lachlan Turczan documented the installation using an old Rolleiflex film camera, a detail he mentions on purpose. Film, he says, seems like the right medium for capturing the physical properties of light. The same instinct runs through Veil V, where submerged planes of laser light are held suspended in a murky pool by the mud itself, the particles in the water acting as the medium through which the beams become visible and volumetric. There’s also Gateway, commissioned for the Manar Abu Dhabi public light art exhibition from November 2025 to January 2026, the largest version of this research to date, where a series of articulated steel arches – fourteen feet wide and high, spanning 129 feet along a path next to a mangrove sanctuary on Jubail Island – carry laser projects. revealed by the mist.
the next three images are taken with an old Rolleiflex film camera during the installation of ‘Aldwa Alsael’
As visitors walk under the successive arches of the Gate, sheets of light gather and fall around them and the wind sweeps the rays away. The artist describes the experience as passing through a waterfall or a cloud. The distinction matters because it does not make an installation that shows viewers what a waterfall looks like, but creates conditions where the body comes into contact with a physical experience without water. In many of his works, he treats wind, humidity, the silt content of a particular lake or even the exact temperature at which steam rises from a hot spring at dawn as collaborators.
They are variables that make each installation an art in itself. Wavering, made during an artist residency at Piaule in the Catskills in 2023, projects a lack of light in a pool, reflecting a circle on a translucent screen placed in the landscape. When the water is disturbed by a hand, by the wind, by a passing animal, the circle dissolves into changing patterns that gradually return to geometry. Watching people encounter it for the first time, regardless of age, Lachlan Turczan noticed their childlike nature as they reached out and stirred the water on purpose and watched the cycle return. This return is a recurring structure in the artist’s work because Lachlan Turczan does not play with metaphor, but shows what light and water can do through physics, art and technology.
For the artist, film photography seems like a suitable medium for capturing the physical properties of light
this work of art is a series of three lighthouses along the shores of Wafi Hanifah
Veil II in California’s Mojave Desert
