The Work

The installation featured projections of animation clips onto cardboard models of buildings, set within a gallery space in the Imperial Buildings. These animations, originally created during my time in the building, were re-contextualised to explore how past creative work resonates in a new temporal and spatial framework. The models, acting as stand-ins for urban architecture, created a dynamic interplay between the physical structures and the ephemeral nature of animation.

The gallery setting added another layer of meaning, turning the space into a container of memories—both my own and those of the audience who engaged with the installation.

Exhibition

Imperial Ghosts was exhibited as part of the 2017 LUX Light Festival, using the Imperial Buildings as a backdrop to revisit and reinterpret the animations I produced there. The work invited audiences to engage with the past, not as a distant narrative, but as a tangible and evolving presence within familiar spaces.

Reflection

Through Imperial Ghosts, I explored how spaces hold traces of the lives and work that pass through them. By bringing animations created in the same building back into its walls—albeit in a different form—the project became a reflection on the cyclical nature of creativity and memory. It asked viewers to consider how their own spaces and pasts might shape their present realities.

Imperial Ghosts – Memories and Reflections in Space

Imperial Ghosts is an immersive installation that explores the interplay between personal memory and urban space. Presented as part of the LUX Light Festival 2017 in Wellington, the project transformed a gallery within the Imperial Buildings (43–47 Dixon Street) into a space for reflection and recollection.

The Concept

The project is rooted in personal connection, as the Imperial Buildings once housed my animation studio from 2002 to 2004. This work revisits that space, reinterpreting fragments of the animations I created during those years. Through projection and model-based installations, Imperial Ghosts becomes a meditation on memory and how physical places become layered with personal histories.