how lachlan turczan reshapes matter by bending light and water in atmospheric installations

physics, optics, and environmental art by lachlan turczan

There’s a moment in Lachlan Turczan’s work where the space shifts – a desert at dawn, a mangrove reserve at night, or a gallery in Milan – and the viewers soon realize that what they’re looking at is a moving light. It has volume and stands in the air like a wall or a column, and when they move toward it, it responds, flowing like water yet diaphanous like a thin, translucent fabric. From here, the realization comes through: light can behave like matter, and Lachlan Turczan has mastered the ways it bends, shifts, and dances.

The Los Angeles-based artist’s practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light. His materials read like a physics experiment – acrylic optics, stainless steel, sensors, silt, steam – but the experience his work creates is closer to standing inside a weather system than inside an installation because viewers don’t just get to watch the pieces come alive, but they move through them, immersing them into an interactive environment.

all images courtesy of Lachlan Turczan

sculptures that use laser, sensors, acrylic and custom lenses

The question of when light stopped being a medium and became a material is one Lachlan Turczan returns to often. It comes up in his Veil Series, a collection of field pieces made alone or with small teams, often at night, in locations that already carried natural phenomena. Veil II was made in the Mojave Desert at dawn, where steam rising from natural hot springs meets cold air and creates its own atmosphere. The artist arrived an hour before sunrise, set up laser projectors in the steam field, and watched as the beams split the moisture into magenta and blue clouds, using the same physics that generates a rainbow, produced at an intimate, human scale. There’s also Veil III, which happened during a storm on the banks of a creek in Sea Ranch, California.

By the time his batteries died and he had to pack up, Lachlan Turczan describes it as waking from a dream, with the weather and the light having merged so completely. Those field experiments fed directly into the studio practice and the larger commissions that followed. Light Object, a 2026 studio work, distilled the outdoor phenomena into a controlled environment as a contained sculpture that uses laser, water, sensors, acrylic, and custom lenses, specifically to understand the mechanics well enough to scale them up. It became the direct precursor to Lucida, the full-body walk-through sculpture first shown in 2025, built from 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, responds around them, and changes when they enter it.

lachlan turczan
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 has said about participation is that choreography happens through physics, not instruction. The work creates conditions that invite curiosity, and then he 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 at architectural scale, with three steel lighthouses standing along the shore of Wadi Hanifah, a valley with a seasonal river, casting beams into the water each evening. From a specific 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 anamorphosis, or an optical effect where a distorted image becomes singular from a specific viewpoint.

Lachlan Turczan documented the installation using an old Rolleiflex film camera, a detail he mentions with intention. Film, he says, feels like an appropriate medium for capturing the physical qualities of light. The same instinct runs through Veil V, where submerged planes of laser light are held in suspension in a murky pond by the silt 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 through January 2026, the largest version of this investigation to date, where a sequence of modular steel arches – fourteen feet wide and high, stretching 129 feet along a path beside a mangrove reserve on Jubail Island – carries laser projectors and custom optics that convert divergent beams into parallel planes, revealed by mist.

lachlan turczan
the next three images are taken with an old Rolleiflex film camera during the installation of ‘Aldwa Alsael’

As visitors walk beneath successive arches of Gateway, the light sheets gather and fall around them, and the wind draws the beams into drift. The artist describes the experience as passing through a waterfall or a cloud. The distinction matters because he isn’t making an installation that shows viewers what a waterfall looks like but builds conditions where the body comes into contact with a physical experience without the water. In many of his works, he treats wind, humidity, the silt content of a particular pond, or even the exact temperature at which steam rises from a hot spring at dawn as collaborators.

They’re variables that make each installation a craft of its own. Wavering, made during an artist residency at Piaule in the Catskills in 2023, projects an ellipse of light onto a pool, reflecting a circle onto a translucent screen laid in the landscape. When the water is disturbed by a hand, by wind, by a passing animal, the circle dissolves into shifting patterns that gradually return to geometry. Watching people encounter it for the first time, regardless of age, Lachlan Turczan noticed the childlike nature in them as they reached out and disturbed the water on purpose and watched the circle come back. That return is a recurring structure across the artist’s work because Lachlan Turczan isn’t playing with metaphor but showcases what light and water can do through physics, art, and technology.

lachlan turczan
for the artist, photographing on film feels like an appropriate medium for capturing the physical qualities of light