The Art of Light and Form: Inside the World of Altūm

Could you introduce yourself and tell us how your artistic journey led to the creation of Altūm and your distinctive approach to relief art?

My name is Kalani Wijewardana. I was born in Sri Lanka, and my family migrated to Melbourne when I was young. Growing up I always had an eye for how things looked: proportion, colour, what worked and what didn't. But I never pursued it. I had the attraction without the courage, which I suspect is a common story.

The turning point came during Melbourne's COVID lockdowns, which were some of the longest in the world. Our little lockdown bubble was looking for something to do. We couldn't go anywhere, but we wanted the time to count for something. So we built an installation together: a dimensional piece, made by hand. It was the first time I had made something with real relief, something that could never be repeated, and making it gave those months a sense of purpose. When my family moved to Singapore during the tail end of COVID, the piece was too fragile to travel. It stayed behind, but it never left my mind.

In Singapore we lived opposite ION Orchard, and almost every room in our apartment looked onto it. I saw that building at every hour: waking up, through the afternoon, late at night. I became fascinated by how much it changed depending on how the light hit it. It was never the same building twice. I kept thinking: how do you capture that and bring it inside, into a home? Not an image of it. The behaviour itself. That question is where Altūm comes from.

The other thread is what I am drawn to aesthetically: brutalist architecture, engineered precision, minimalism. I find real beauty in engineering excellence. But I am equally influenced by Yohji Yamamoto, who distrusts perfect surfaces because they can erase the person who made them. I am drawn to the flaws as much as the perfection; the edges you cannot get from a machine; organic irregularity inside precision engineering. That's where my work lives.

You describe relief as something that sits between painting and sculpture. What attracted you to this space between two traditional art forms?

I've always loved what each form does well. A painting gives you colour and composition, but it presents one plane to the room. It reads the same at eight in the morning as it does at eight at night. Sculpture is alive in space; it changes as you move around it. But sculpture is demanding. It asks for floor space, a plinth, a surface, room to circle it. Not every space, and not every life, can give it that.

Relief sits between the two, and that's what drew me in: the presence of sculpture in the footprint of a painting. A painted surface that leaves the wall. Because every facet meets its neighbours at a different angle, a single colour is never one colour. It shifts with where you stand and when you look. Two people looking at the same piece are seeing different things, and neither of them is wrong. It's an enhancement of both forms, not a compromise between them.

I can point to the precise moment this clicked. When we built the lockdown installation, we weren't trying to create relief at all. I wanted to get to the essence of impressionism: the way the brain combines colours to create form. One way to make the eye do that work is to break the image up, and adding relief was how we did it. And it worked. But the piece became so much more than the idea we started with. It changed with the light, with where you stood. That was the moment I found myself asking: why should art be flat?

You have said that a flat artwork can fill a wall without truly becoming part of the room. What do you believe three-dimensional relief brings to an interior that conventional wall art cannot?

A modern interior is already a study in planes and light. That's why minimalist spaces work: not because of what's in them, but because of geometry, and the way light and shadow move across surfaces through the day. The room is already doing something quietly beautiful.

A flat artwork doesn't join in. It's sealed behind glass, presenting one unchanging plane. It fills the wall without being in the room.

Relief speaks the room's own language. It has planes, edges, shadows, the same vocabulary as the architecture around it. When the room's light changes, the piece changes with it. It casts real shadows, not printed ones. And it does this in the footprint of a painting: all the drama, without adding a single object to the floor. To me that's the difference between decorating a wall and giving the room another surface to live on.

Your works can project significantly from the wall, creating an almost architectural presence. How do you determine the depth and geometry of each composition?

The honest answer is that depth is decided by the room before it's decided by me. The two questions I start with are: how far away will this piece be seen from, and what will the light be doing? A relief seen across a lobby can carry deep, bold geometry: big moves, long shadows. The same depth in a bedroom would be overwhelming; up close, the more subtle angles can do more work, because you're close enough to catch the angle.

Beyond that, the boldness of the colours, the differences in complexity and the angles are all there to create contrast. The deep facets make the shallow ones matter. If everything projects at 300 mm at the same angle, what you get is a blur. The eye needs quiet zones for the drama to register. So a composition usually gets one or two commanding planes and a field of restraint around them. That instinct comes from the architecture I love: brutalist buildings aren't dramatic everywhere. They're mostly calm and unapologetic.

The geometry is designed for every piece. It's not selected from a library. Every form is sculpted for that piece alone, based on where it will live and how the light is going to hit it. I'll iterate the geometry on screen, watching how virtual light moves across it, until the shadows play the way I want. Then it's made, and the real light gets its say.

Light appears to be almost a second medium in your work. How does the same relief change from morning light to midday and then under evening illumination?

Calling light a second medium is very close. I'd say it's the final painter. I bring the piece to a point, and whatever light is available at the time does the finishing touches. Different every moment, forever.

This is ION Orchard brought inside the house. The surface has angles and depth, so it catches the light differently from moment to moment. When the sun is low, I've watched light rake across the piece and drop really long shadows. At midday the shadows almost disappear. Then at night, under downlights, the ridges catch and the valleys fall into darkness. My favourite is when we're winding down, with just the table lamps on — it turns moody, almost sinister.

There's another effect I love. If I glance at the piece while walking past, the facets shimmer and light up one by one as my angle changes. It never switches off.

They say a picture tells a thousand words, but a picture can't quite capture this. A photograph is one moment of the piece, frozen. The piece itself keeps going. You don't hang it and finish with it. You live with something that has moods.

Do you consider the lighting conditions of the future interior while designing a piece, and what type of lighting best reveals the geometry of your work?

If I'm asked for the best lighting conditions for my work, the answer is dim light arriving at a low angle. Light from directly in front flattens everything, geometry included. Light that grazes across the surface is what lets the facets do their work: a wall-washer, a track head angled off to one side, even a humble table lamp. That's what brings out the mood. But I try not to over-analyse. The work is designed to live in real rooms with real light, and the changing, imperfect light of a home is the whole point. The work will take whatever light the room offers and make something of it.

Your process combines digital design and custom technology with extensive hand-finishing. Could you take us through the journey from the initial geometric concept to the completed artwork?

Every piece starts with the sculpture, designed on a computer following an architectural process. This is where I simulate the light that will hit the surface. I can run a full day of sunlight and night light across the form and work out where to emphasise and where to knock back. The iteration takes time, days sometimes, depending on the form, the complexity, and how I'm feeling. The complexity of a piece is a by-product of my own mood. But the resulting geometry must be precise, because everything that follows depends on it.

Building the sculpture is a multi-step process, but by the end of it I have my unique, one-of-a-kind canvas. Then the slow, organic part begins. I paint every surface by hand, one at a time. Paint, and repaint, depending on how it looks as the light moves through the day. Facets of a piece are characters to me. In every piece there's a hero, and there's a villain trying to draw the eye away; there are shadows interplaying between them. In my mind I'm composing a story of drama and balance.

If the piece came out machine perfect, I would have failed. This is where I keep coming back to Yamamoto. Building something flawless is process, materials, relentless continuous improvement. It's engineering, and I love engineering. But the organic, imperfect qualities, the ones that depend on how I feel that day and how the piece speaks to me — that's the art. That's the piece of my soul that engineering lacks.

By the end, the work is something neither half of the process could have made alone. It's the yin and yang of engineering and free will.

Each facet is painted by hand with consideration for how light will strike it. How do color, geometry, reflection, and shadow work together when you develop a composition?

The thing I learned quickly with relief is that you never paint with one instrument. You actually work with four at once. Colour is obviously the loudest. Geometry decides how much light a facet gets. Reflection depends on the finish: gloss or matte, to throw light or to hold it. And then there's shadow, the one I don't paint at all. The finished work is a composition of all four.

My role is to balance what I can control, pre-empt what I can't, and set the stage for the drama between the facets and the colours. Every piece is a battle to draw the viewer's eye. Success, for me, is when there is no clear winner.

You describe your work as “unique twice over”, because both the painting and the sculptural form are one of a kind. Why is this level of uniqueness important to you?

It goes back to that first lockdown piece. Part of what moved me about it was that it could never be repeated.

We live in a moment where technology can replicate almost anything, perfectly, endlessly. I use that technology, so I know exactly what it's capable of. That's why I've made unrepeatability a rule of the work, not an accident of it. The geometry is sculpted once, for one piece, and never reused. Then the painting happens by hand, facet by facet, and hand work can't be repeated either, not even by me. So, the painting is one of a kind, and so is the sculpture beneath it. Unique twice over.

For the person who owns the piece, it means there is no edition, no second copy in someone else's home. But honestly, it matters to me before it matters to anyone else. If a work could be run off again, something about the hand in it would stop being true.

No two works share exactly the same three-dimensional form. How do you document and authenticate this individuality for collectors and clients?

Every piece is sold with a certificate containing the node map of its geometry, the set of points that defines the three-dimensional form. We call it the fingerprint, because that's what it is: the structure of that work and no other. It's why we can say the work is unique twice over and prove it. For a collector or a designer, it means a signature piece can't quietly turn up somewhere else.

Altūm uses a modular panel system that can expand from a single framed artwork to an installation covering an entire wall. How did you develop this system, and what possibilities does it give you creatively?

It came from a frustration, really. Walls aren't standard, so why should art be? So the work is built as modules that compose into a whole, which means a piece can be sized to the wall it will live on, not the other way around.

The same language can produce an intimate framed work or run the full width of a room, and the geometry can flow across the panels as one continuous composition. The whole system scales to within a few millimetres.

And of course there are standard sizes as well. Those are the bread and butter of the studio. Not every wall needs a bespoke piece; it just deserves the option.

How do you adapt a commissioned work to a particular architectural space, whether it is a private residence, staircase, headboard, feature wall, lobby, or large hospitality environment?

Every one of those spaces is seen differently, and that's what the work adapts to. A staircase piece is seen in motion, from constantly changing angles: more chaos, shorter stories. The geometry rewards movement. A headboard or a bedroom wall is seen up close and lived with at night, so it stays calm and shallow. A lobby is seen across distance, so it can afford drama over longer planes and deeper angles. The room tells me how it will be looked at and how the light will greet it; I sculpt for that. Size, palette, depth all follows from the same conversation with the space.

When collaborating with interior designers and architects, how closely can the artwork be coordinated with the project's palette, materials, dimensions, and finishes?

Very closely, and as early as possible. Because every piece is sculpted for its wall, dimensions are exact by nature. Colour can be matched to the project's palette, and finishes chosen to sit with the materials around them: gloss against stone, matte against timber. Designers approve the direction before anything starts. I also share the light simulations and engineering files, so there are no surprises on installation day.

There is a considerable technical side to creating and installing large-scale relief works. What should architects and interior designers know about commissioning, installation, lighting, and production timelines?

Mostly, that it's simpler than it sounds. The work arrives as finished panels that lock together and hangs the way substantial art hangs. No construction, no special engineering from the project team. Large installations go up in stages, and lighting guidance comes with the piece, though as I said earlier, the work will take whatever light the room offers. Timelines depend on scale and complexity, and we agree to them at commission. The technical side is my responsibility; the designer's side of it is a conversation, not a project.

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