Moments that lit the lake - Brad Spalding

Light, Place, Return

For me, Lake Light Sculpture has never been about spectacle. It has always been about return.

Each time I come back to Lake Jindabyne, I arrive with new questions, but the same horizon.
The same water. The same shifting edge between land, memory, and reflection.

Over the years, the lake has become more than a site - it’s a collaborator. It reflects, distorts, doubles, and absorbs the work, folding it into weather, time, and lived experience. Nothing exists there in isolation.

Living and working in the Snowy Mountains, my practice is inseparable from place. The landscape here carries deep cultural, ecological, and personal histories. At Lake Light Sculpture, those layers feel especially close to the surface. The lake holds stories - some visible, some submerged - and light has become the way I try to speak with them.

Light, for me, is not decorative. It reveals weight. It amplifies stillness. It makes familiar forms quietly uncanny. In a landscape defined by cold, wind, cloud, and long darkness, light becomes a language. It skims across water, fractures in waves, disappears into fog, and returns again as reflection. At Lake Jindabyne, the lake doesn’t simply hold the work - it completes it.

Kabob uses illuminated granite boulders stacked vertically, referencing First Nations connections across the Snowy Mountains. Each stone stands for Country - distinct yet interconnected. Natural pigments speak to ancient practices, while neon accents introduce a contemporary layer, bridging old and new ways of seeing. The work acknowledges the Bogong Moth gatherings that shaped this region for millennia, and the ecological and cultural knowledge embedded in this landscape long before my own presence within it.

With Narrania Brilo, a glowing orange house floats alone on the lake, its warm interior light set against approaching storms. It reads as both beacon and mirage. The work speaks to shelter and exposure, to the human impulse to build meaning in vast, unforgiving environments. Seen from the shore, it feels close yet unreachable - comforting and unsettling at the same time.

Raise One to the Old Jindabyne Pub turns inward, both spatially and emotionally. A softly illuminated structure floats just offshore, scaled from the Old Hotel Jindabyne - one of the buildings submerged when the original town was flooded for the Snowy Hydro project in the early 1960s. The sculpture sits between presence and absence. Inside, faint human silhouettes move behind translucent walls - half remembered, half imagined. Their gestures are indistinct, inviting viewers to slow down, to look carefully, and to acknowledge loss not as something finished, but as something that continues to surface. At night, the work creates a quietly stirring scene. Reflected on the water, it feels almost inhabited by sound - the imagined clink of glasses, low conversation, laughter drifting across time. It becomes less a monument and more a shared pause. A collective act of remembering what lies beneath the lake’s surface. During installation, a phone was accidentally dropped into the water and never recovered. It remains somewhere below — an unplanned but fitting footnote. Like the old pub itself, it is still there, held by the lake, folded into its layered history.

Across more than twenty-five years of Lake Light Sculpture, my works have traced a quiet arc - from balance, to shelter, to memory. They are always temporary. Always responsive. Always shaped by light, weather, and reflection. And always rooted in this place.

The lake reflects everything back at you - light, weather, history. You’re never working alone out there.

— Spalding

A note from Brad…

Dear friends, makers, wanderers, and lovers of glowing things,

Every Easter, as the sun dips behind the Snowies and the lake begins to hum with reflections, something quietly magical unfolds in Jindabyne. Lake Light Sculpture isn’t just an art show - it’s a tradition. A kind of ritual where creativity spills out of sheds, studios, and workshops and onto the shoreline, blinking and glowing like it just wandered in from a dream.

But lately, I’ve found myself wondering - what exactly are we glowing for?

You see, this event didn’t just appear out of the mist. It was built, quite literally, from the sparks of local craftspeople. Mick Gow, founder of Kaotic, was one of the wild ones who first imagined the idea - way back when it was still called the Jindabyne Easter Festival (JEF, for those who remember the dusty flyers and home-welded installations). His vision wasn’t just about art. It was about people.

The idea was simple and brilliant: bring together welders, stonemasons, carpenters, painters, sculptors - anyone who could turn a chunk of metal or wood into something that caught light and imagination. It wasn’t about polish. It wasn’t about perfection. It was about connection - between craft and place, between maker and viewer, between fire and water.

And here we are, twenty-five-plus years on.

The event is still beautiful, still surprising, still wrapped in that cool alpine air. But the philosophy - the original spirit - is starting to feel a little… faint.

It’s not the fault of any one person or group. It’s what happens when success grows and structures settle in. But we should be careful. There’s a difference between evolving and forgetting. Between opening the door wider, and accidentally leaving the heart outside.

Because Lake Light was never meant to be just about art. It was about making - about locals dragging their art down to the lakeside in utes held together by prayer and rust, lighting them with car batteries, and standing beside them at dusk, grinning like kids who just pulled off a magic trick.

Some of that scrappy brilliance still lingers, but we could use more of it. More welders teaching kids how to build. More timber offcuts turned into poetry. More light that comes from effort.

The event isn’t lost - not even close. But the philosophy? That’s the part we need to keep tending. Like a campfire. It doesn’t take much to let it go cold, but if we lean in, add the right wood, maybe poke it once in a while — it’ll glow stronger than ever.

Let’s make sure Lake Light Sculpture keeps feeling like it came from here. From us. From the sparks and splinters of our own stories.

Warmly,
Spalding