SIMPLICES

Category: Art Installation
Location: Hamiltons Gap, Āwhitu Peninsula, west coast, Aotearoa New Zealand
Size: 250m x 250m x 2.2m (L) · 4 units at 1.5m l x 1.5m w x 2.2m h
Material: carbon fibre, machined aluminium, 3D printed nylon, optical mirrors, gears, electronics, high-powered RGB laser
Year: 2025

Four sentinels on New Zealand’s black-sand coast use a single laser, three mirrors, and four vertices to draw transient geometric forms—lines, triangles, squares, and crosses—250 metres across. Inspired by the mathematical concept of the simplex, the work reduces geometry to its simplest element: the line between two points. Each figure exists only as long as the precise alignment holds, turning the vast, ancient landscape into a fleeting act of surveying with light.

Four sentinels stand on a black sand beach ninety kilometres south of Auckland and draw with a single beam of coherent light. One laser, three mirrors, four vertices, and nothing else — every figure the work makes is assembled from straight edges run between those four points. A line. A triangle. A square. A cross. 250m across, and gone the instant the beam is broken.

A simplex is the simplest figure a given number of points can bound. Two points give a segment, three a triangle, four a tetrahedron. Simplices are the irreducible units mathematicians decompose a space into, and reassemble it from. This work runs that logic in the physical world with a hard constraint: the apparatus can make exactly one thing, an edge between two vertices. Every figure it draws is those edges combined — the whole greater than the sum of its parts, at a quarter of a kilometre.

Each of the four modules is carbon fibre, machined aluminium and 3D printed nylon, 1.5m square at the base and 2.2m tall. One carries the master geared head and the laser source; the other three carry optical mirrors that intercept the beam and return it. Rotation runs on two axes through manual gearing, the ratios chosen so a hand movement at the head resolves to a fraction of a degree downrange. At 250m, a fraction of a degree is the difference between a closed figure and a beam lost to the Tasman.

The site is Hamiltons Gap, where a stream cuts the dune ridge on the Āwhitu Peninsula and opens onto one of the most exposed stretches of ironsand coast in the country. The dunes behind the beach are among the highest in the region, accumulated over two million years from iron-rich sand eroded off the Taranaki volcanoes and dragged north by longshore drift, mixed with pumice and quartz out of the Waikato River. The work lays a Euclidean figure over that. Two million years of accumulation, and a square that exists for exactly as long as somebody holds the alignment. The dichotomy is intentional.

Lasers are theodolites with the arithmetic taken out. What happens on this beach is a survey — the immense charted by fixing a few finite points and trusting the lines drawn between them, which is how it has always been done, with knotted cord and sextant and now with coherent light. And like every survey, this one is provisional. Fog scatters it. Cloud takes it. A hand slips on the gear and the triangle opens. The figure holds only as long as it is held. Then the beach goes back to what it was.