Vivid Sydney is underway for another year and as usual the centre-piece is the Sydney Opera House. Australian artist Jonathan Zawada talks to Limelight about this year’s artwork, his 3D light sculpture Mathemagical.

What are the technical and artistic challenges of creating a work for a site like the Sydney Opera House?

The Sydney Opera House is such a completely unique piece of geometry and creating work that can both utilise that geometry to its fullest while also maintaining compositional dynamism proved particularly challenging. This challenge also ended up being a huge source of inspiration and generator for ideas, making the process completely unlike any other.

What ideas did you want to explore in this work?

Metamathemagical is kind of a macroscopic view of the concept of creation, an exploration of what the creative process is on both an individual, personal level, but also on a cosmic and environmental level. The interplay between intentionality and inevitability, between natural evolution and directed action. I took inspiration for this piece from the natural world and...