The work was constructed through workshops at schools and at the Palais during July, August, and September 2002, with the aim of completing the artwork for display in Hunter Street Newcastle for the This Is Not Art Festival in October.
Wave~length was designed as a project that would create a public artwork using recycled materials with local young people.
Over two hundred children participated in these workshops at three local schools, while a smaller group of young people worked on assemblage of the artwork at the Palais. At the school workshops the students were invited to help construct the artwork which first of all involved explaining the artwork, its methodology and meanings.
The students then stained hundreds of unrecycled plastic bottles with paint in an exercise that explored the possibilities of colour mixing. Other older students then punched holes in the bottles and attached wire to them so that the flattened bottles could be attached to the surface of the artwork.
The next stage of the work at the Palais involved the preparation of boards, the drawing of the lines, the cutting of holes into the boards, and the actual assemblage of the artwork.
This work was designed to present differently at night. It was for this reason that hundreds of holes were cut into the boards which were the surface of the work. The stained plastic bottles covered these holes and lighting inside the building then backlit the piece in the manner of a stained glass window or a neon sign.
Wave~length offers a number of possible readings and associations. Light waves, ocean waves, the colour spectrum, neon signs, stained-glass windows and the flow of energy among them. It connected traditional formal aspects of artmaking such as colour mixing and drawing with contemporary interests in the found object, process and assemblage.