Accomplished Australian artist Emma Coulter was commissioned to create the signature public artwork for Yarrila Place. Emma has designed a vibrant steel and glass artwork that incorporates painting, sculpture, and engineering. The result is a structure that leaps up the curves of the wall and overlooks the atrium, filling it with colour and light.

Yarrila means to illuminate, brighten, light up or illustrate. The inspiration Emma Coulter’s commissioned work for Yarrila Place comes from the idea of light refracting on the surface of the water and dispersing into colour. Emma’s work is site-specific, so it was important for the artist and the final artwork to consider the context of the site, the place, and the history. Along with the Gumbaynggirr name, Coulter also drew from the historical significance of the South Solitary lighthouse built on the Coffs Coast in 1878 as well as the architecture of Yarrila Place itself.

Having grown up in Southeast Queensland as a young girl, Coulter experienced fun road trips that she made with friends to the Coffs Coast and its beautiful beaches. She wanted the artwork to capture some of these feelings of joyousness as well as the area’s natural beauty through a sense of colour. The work draws on the significance of land and sea to Coffs Harbour. 

‘Let them feel the light' is both the concept for and title of the work that traverses the interior walls of Yarrila Place’s atrium, reaching from the ground to 1st floor. 

This brightly coloured, geometric sculpture has a highly chromatic, glossy metal surface, dispersed with illuminated coloured panels. The work extends across a height of ten metres and the geometric modules, fabricated in Brisbane by Stainless Aesthetics, are about twenty metres in length in total.

The work’s 3-dimensional and illuminated qualities as well as the way it wraps around and up the wall make it visible from many different viewpoints within the space and allow for the work to be experienced in a myriad of ways.

An integrated three-story sculpture, the work will traverse the light-filled atrium space at Yarrila Place, dispersing colour and light, in honour of the meaning of “Yarrila” – a Gumbaynggirr word meaning to illuminate or brighten. Custom steel/ aluminiumglazing frame structure, with integrated LEDs and laminated colour interlay glazing.

See more information and photographs on artist's website: let them feel the light by Emma Coulter at Yarrila Place — Emma Coulter