He put on the world’s biggest light show ever. Now, he’s planning to beat that – here

Kari Kola is supposed to be meeting me for lunch at a pub in Albany, on the south coast of Western Australia. But when I get there after flying in from Perth, he’s nowhere to be found. It turns out he is at that moment on the other side of the bay, a couple of kilometres off-road in the middle of Torndirrup National Park, standing next to a rented Isuzu AWD that has two of its wheels stuck in a rocky crevasse, the car leaning at a precarious angle and going nowhere fast.

By the time I get to him and his colleagues, two young locals have arrived to pull the car out with their truck, laconic half-grins on their faces that suggest this is not the first time they’ve had to swoop in and save a hapless tourist.
As for Kola, he’s all smiles. “It was a happy accident,” he tells me, shrugging. “If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have met these guys, and now they’re going to help me next year with lugging the equipment for the project.”

The project? Well, that’s the reason I’m here. And – spoiler alert – this will not be the last time today his car gets stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Kari Kola is 47 years old and looks like a character out of Game of Thrones. He’s short, stocky, bearded, wears his hair in a man bun and has a long, plaited beard that reaches down to his substantial belly. He has not cut his beard since 1999, when he decided to change his life.

He is Finnish and lives in Joensuu, a five-hour drive north-east of Helsinki. There he has a 1000-square-metre warehouse space that he uses as his workshop. It’s full of lighting equipment.

Kari Kola is the best-known light artist in the world. He has lit up everything from Stonehenge to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. His 2020 work, Savage Beauty, was staged in Connemara in Galway, western Ireland, and he battled freezing conditions, gale-force winds, logistical nightmares, equipment malfunctions and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to make it happen. It was the biggest light art installation in history. Until now. Lighting the Sound, which will take place in Albany over three weekends in March next year, and is part of the city’s bicentenary program, will be bigger. How big?

“It’s going to be around 12 kilometres wide, which is roughly double the scale of Connemara,” says Kola, as he tucks into a parmi and sips a beer back at the pub in town. “There will be 800 to 900 lights, about 15 towers, and an area of around a thousand hectares. It’s the biggest project I’ve ever done, and I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.”

Kola has had a couple of epiphanies about light in his life. The first was in 1999, when he dropped out of working menial jobs in construction and in factories. He decided to take 12 months for himself. He had been hyperactive since he was a kid, but wanted to slow down, take a breath and learn to play the piano. And then he applied for two trainee positions – one was at Botania, Joensuu’s botanical garden; the other was in sound and lighting at Joensuu City Theatre. He was accepted to both of them within an hour of each other. Although he chose the latter, his love of the botanical garden continues to this day – in fact, he bought the four-hectare garden, which consists of a greenhouse and a sprawling outdoor “art” garden, seven years ago, after it fell into neglect because of a shortfall in funding from the university that managed it. Kola lives next door to the garden in a bungalow with his wife and nine-year-old son.

Beginning at the Joensuu City Theatre, Kola spent years learning the technical craft of sound and lighting, working on hundreds of performances. Then, in 2006, he had an accident. “I was dismantling a gig in a concert hall. I slipped carrying a load of 40 kilos of lighting equipment and I cracked my spine. I was paralysed from the waist down. I had an operation and had to learn to walk again. At first, I was thinking it was the worst thing that could happen to me. But now I think it’s the best thing that could have happened to me.”

Why?

“Because I had to learn patience. I remember while I was recuperating a friend dropped me in the city centre, and I walked one block. It was maybe a hundred metres. It took me four hours. But in that time I started observing everything around me. It changed my perspective on things. After a while, I realised that it was changing me. I still remember the details of everything I saw on that walk 19 years ago.”

He mainly remembers the light, which is not unusual in a country enshrouded in darkness or semi-darkness for months at a time. “It can be over 35 degrees in summer but can be minus 40 in winter with only a few hours of light,” he notes. “In winter, you just feel like hibernating, like a bear.”

This second epiphany changed his life. “I made the decision that I would work with light on a scale no one else was doing.”

Kola’s work is not what you might think of as a light show – things don’t flash, or even move. And that’s deliberate. “We are so easily distracted today, and we can’t focus on anything for too long. People come to see my work and expect a million things to happen, but instead I give them just one thing, an image on a very large scale, and it causes them to slow down and observe. And they see something that I hope they will remember for years.”

We finish lunch, jump into the Isuzu and head back to the national park. Kola needs to scout more locations around King George Sound for the towers he will be setting up to mount the lights.

We’re being driven by Patrick Donovan, cultural tourism adviser at FORM Building a State of Creativity, the WA arts organisation that is producing Lighting the Sound. Donovan is being cautious after this morning’s mishap. Once we’re off-road, he regularly stops to walk ahead when he sees a tricky section, making sure we can get through without getting stuck. Kola regularly treks off into the bush. At one point, he calls out to Donovan to say he’s found a good position for a tower.

Donovan catches up to him and punches the co-ordinates into his phone, then surveys the surrounding area, takes photos, and starts talking about how it might be tricky to access. He turns to Kola. “If you really want a tower here …”

“Not if,” says Kola, cutting him off mid-sentence. “We need a tower here.”

Later, Kola tells me about a Finnish word – sisu. “It’s used to describe Finnish people’s reputation for stubbornness. It’s a national trait. The more shit you come up against, the more you push. You don’t give up.” He smiles. “I’m very Finnish.”

A few hours later, we return to town, and stop at a lookout tower on Mount Melville, so Kola can survey the far shore from a distance. As the wind howls around us, he waves his arm across the water to the expanse of beach, shoreline and hills. “I know it just looks like one surface from here, but what I see are many layers, and I have to light them all,” he says. “The landscape is my canvas and the lights are my paints. That’s how I draw. Because I can’t actually draw. I’m terrible.”

I ask him if he considers the effect lights have on flora and fauna. “Of course. Light pollution is a major issue in the world. Our cities produce far too much light. It’s a waste. It’s madness. That’s why all my projects are short-term. You can’t make them long-term because the impact on the environment would be bad.

“We’ve been working with environmentalists on this project for six months already. They check every single spot where we need to put a tower, and they take pictures and do surveys and decide if we can do it there or not. Our aim is to not leave any trace that we’ve been here after we leave.”

Kola wants to test the range and brightness of one of his lights from a beach on the other side of the bay, so after darkness falls, we head back out. After a 20-minute drive we go off-road and down a sandy track for another kilometre. There’s a fork in the path. “Take the left!” Kola calls out, and Donovan turns the wheel.

Then there’s a sharp right turn on a blind corner. The car takes the corner, then takes a nosedive. We stop with a jolt, the front bumper just centimetres from thick bush and an embankment. We’re hopelessly bogged in soft sand on a steep incline. We try to dig the car out but, with no wiggle room, and the wheels sinking deeper and deeper into the sand every time we hit the gas, we’re stuck. We make a phone call for help.

After about half an hour, Kola says, “Well, if we’re going to be here for a while, I may as well test the light.”

He starts unloading equipment, then heads to the beach. After he’s set it up and switched it on, we walk together along the beach, further and further into the darkness so he can see the effect of the light on the landscape. I ask Kola if he has a holy grail, something he would love to light up before he dies.

“The Great Wall of China,” he says, without hesitation. “It’s over 21,000 kilometres long. It would take five years to plan it, it would use renewable energy, and the technology is almost there. It would be difficult. But I know I can do it.”

“Sisu?” I ask.

He laughs. “Yes! Sisu!”

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