PACIFY (2026)

Good Grief Studios. Hobart, Tasmania. 2026

PACIFY 2026. Photo from the position looking up at the artwork. Photo by Harry Holcombe-James.

PACIFY was presented at Good Grief Studios, Hobart, across nine days in May 2026, open four hours per day, two days per week.

On arrival, participants entered a darkened room where a series of light boxes displayed gently evolving animations. The space was designed to slow the visitor down with a quiet transition that allowed the eyes to adjust and the mind to settle before entering the work itself.

Participants then moved into the main structure and lay down inside an enclosed dome. For fifteen minutes, a custom three-axis kinetic system operated overhead in concert with slowly shifting light and sound. The experience was durational and fixed requiring participants to move through it from beginning to end.

The work received over 60 attendances across its season. Despite limited opening hours, the work had repeated viewings from some visitors, suggesting the experience had something worth going back to.

PACIFY 2026. 2mins30secs. Condensed Video of the PACIFY experience. Video by Harry Holcombe-James. If video is lagging, right-click here and download linked file.

PACIFY is interested in stillness as a point of access, as a way of reaching the layer of experience that sits above or beneath the texture of daily life. The work uses digital technology to get there: every element, the movement of the kinetic system, the shifting light, the sound, is controlled and choreographed by digital means. But the forms it produces are abstract and open. The animated physical movement overhead doesn’t represent anything specific, which means the viewer brings their own reading to it. The work creates the conditions; the meaning is completed by the person inside it.

Writing in The Mercury’s TasWeekend, critic Andrew Harper described the work as “quite singular,” noting that Holcombe-James had drawn on much older traditions of ritual and perceptual inquiry while using contemporary fabrication and technology to produce something operating on an entirely different plane from light art or immersive spectacle. “Pacify is actually astonishing,” he wrote.

PACIFY 2026. Entry into the dark room that holds the enclosed dome of the PACIFY experience. Photo by Harry Holcombe-James.

PACIFY 2026. Video of the Light Boxes that steady and ground the visitor before entering the work. Video by Harry Holcombe-James. If video is lagging, right-click here and download linked file.

PACIFY 2026. Viewer laying in the centre of the artwork. Photo by Harry Holcombe-James.

PACIFY 2026. Photo by Harry Holcombe-James.

PACIFY 2026. Photo by Harry Holcombe-James.

PACIFY 2026. Detail of the light trails made by the kinetic motion of the LEDs. Photo by Harry Holcombe-James.