Colour-music Split Enz

1975-1983: I worked in collaboration with Split Enz as their lighting and set designer, I travelled in trucks and buses with road crews across USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. I was a fellow student at Elam school of Fine Arts with Noel Crombie, Phil Judd and Robert Gillies.

My intention was to use the contemporary music medium and popular culture to make a change in the way in which it was experienced, and secondly to address the way in which the culture of youth protest is packaged and sold back to youth. Split Enz fully supported my experimentation and the music industry had funds for equipment and lighting technology. 1975 was at a time when as a young woman I had the opportunity to work with coloured light to express my coloured equivalents to music—Colour Music— and to work in an area where women were absent, The early seventies were a time of transformation. Along with The Equal Pay Act 1972 which extended equal pay to women in the private sector and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) an important text in the feminist movement, those years were a time of emancipation and liberating women from traditional constraints.

I translated their music into the deepest saturated colour, employing after-images, coloured shadows, hand painted optical pattern projections, stop motion, UV, the darkness, monotones, optical illusions, contrast and emotional colour sequences. Throughout my endeavours were tied to my coloured music equivalents which I experienced with music.

I regarded my work as art and it was often referred to as an integral part of the performances, the reviews referring to ‘explosions of colour’, ‘like painting with light’. The symbiotic nature of it meant that my work could only exist in the performances or in the various video clips that we made for broadcast.

Later, in 1997 my interest in using light was rekindled when I learnt that the sun rings like a bell, inspiring me to make work again with sound and light connections, starting with ENZSO in a series of performances with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

1997                   ENZSO, Designed and Directed Lumia Australia. Adelaide Symphony Orchestra,Youth Choir,Eddie Rayner,Split Enz

1996                  ENZSO, Designed and Directed Lumia  New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Youth Choir, Eddie Rayner, Split Enz, Poet Sam Hunt.

Documentary Split Enz - Spellbound (1993) The career of New Zealand's pop band Split Enz is recounted from their formation by Mike Chunn, Phil Judd and Tim Finn at Auckland University in 1971 to their demise in 1984, when Neil Finn walked away.

• Directors

  • Kerry Brown

  • Bruce Sheridan

A large collection of Documentaries and Podcasts on Split Enz collated by DigitalNZ Split Enz by NZ on Screen