British artist Liz West (b.1985) has built a career on transforming light and colour into immersive, sensory experiences. Her practice moves fluidly between sculpture, architecture and installation, reconfiguring familiar environments into radiant fields of perception. Across her work, she demonstrates a precise understanding of how chromatic and spatial relationships influence human emotion. Her installations elicit both joy and contemplation, inviting audiences to step into environments where light becomes tactile.
Her latest commission, Double Fizz (2025), marks a defining moment in her exploration of sensory experience. Permanently installed at No.1 St Michael’s in Manchester, the work transforms the building’s main artery into a kaleidoscopic passageway of light and reflection. Constructed from aluminium, pigment-injected polyester, wood and LED spotlights, it reimagines the role of colour within architecture. Thousands of vibrant triangular stripes are overlaid onto mirrored surfaces, creating a shifting field of reflection that changes with every movement through it. The mirrored aluminium doubles and amplifies each hue, producing the eponymous “fizz” – a phenomenon of perpetual reflection and refraction. Rather than a static object, Double Fizz functions as a living environment, unfolding through the presence of its viewers. Their reflections merge into the work’s rhythmic geometry, turning perception into participation.
West describes the commission as deeply personal. “It is a wonderful opportunity to be commissioned to make such a prominent artwork in my home city,” she explains. “I hope that Double Fizz provokes a joyful and heightened sensory awareness in the viewer and creates both a psychological and physical response that taps into our personal relationship and response to colour.” The installation absorbs the energy of its surroundings, translating Manchester’s urban dynamism into radiant abstraction. It stands as a celebration of the city’s creativity and reinvention, echoing its constant sense of movement and renewal.
At the core of West’s practice lies a rigorous engagement with colour theory and its emotional implications. Colour, for her, is never decorative but profoundly human – capable of altering mood, perception, and atmosphere. Drawing on the legacies of Goethe and Josef Albers, she moves beyond optical theory into lived experience. In Double Fizz, light interacts with pigment to create afterimages and shadows that dance across the floor, forming an ever-changing choreography of hues. The work reminds us that perception is unstable, continually redefined by movement, space and light.
The unveiling of Double Fizz coincides with West’s inclusion in Future Tense, part of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2025. That installation extends her inquiry into the ways chromatic transitions shape emotion and time. Semi-transparent panels refract daylight into layered gradients, suggesting how our understanding of the future might be mediated through colour and light. Earlier works such as H.A.P.P.Y (2017) established West’s reputation for merging optical experimentation with psychological well-being. In that project, concentric corridors of coloured light explored how saturation could heighten mood and awareness. Both works reveal her ongoing fascination with the emotional potential of colour.
The mirrored corridor at St Michael’s becomes a space where reflection is both literal and conceptual. Visitors see themselves multiplied within a shared visual field, experiencing a collective encounter rather than a solitary one. The piece embodies West’s belief that public art can create community through sensory engagement. The play of light and reflection mirrors Manchester’s own narrative – a city continually defined by creativity, resilience and reinvention. In this context, Double Fizz becomes an encounter rather than an object. Its chromatic intensity stands in contrast to the neutrality of urban architecture, reminding passers-by that colour has the power to reshape how we move and feel.
West’s practice belongs to a broader conversation on light and perception, resonating with artists such as Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell and Yayoi Kusama. Each engages with light as both material and metaphor, yet West’s approach remains rooted in the tactile and the architectural. Eliasson’s The Weather Project(2003) transformed the Turbine Hall into an atmospheric space of collective reflection. West shares his interest in sensory activation but infuses her environments with a brighter, more playful energy. Turrell’s meditative chambers of light inspire stillness and introspection, while West translates that precision into vibrant public form. Kusama’s mirrored rooms dissolve boundaries between self and space; West echoes this fascination with reflection but steers it toward optimism and communal joy. Her installations celebrate perception itself – the simple act of seeing as an experience of connection.
Double Fizz crystallises a central idea in Liz West’s practice: colour as a democratic force. The installation transforms an everyday corridor into a site of wonder, turning transition into transformation. It insists on the value of sensory engagement in civic life, offering a moment of joy within the flow of the city. In an era saturated by screens and subdued palettes, West restores the vitality of direct experience. The mirrored lightfields of Double Fizz offer a brief pause – a space where colour becomes language and reflection becomes dialogue. The title encapsulates this perfectly: “Double” as mirror, “Fizz” as energy.
Liz West continues to redefine how light and colour shape the way we experience the world. Her installations remind us that perception is participatory – an active exchange between body, space and emotion. In the heart of Manchester, Double Fizz invites viewers to step into a spectrum of possibility and to see the familiar through a heightened, more luminous lens.
Double Fizz is at No.1 St Michael’s, Manchester: st-michaels.com
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
1. Liz West, Shifting Luminosity, 2015.
2. Liz West, Her Warm Reflection, 2023.
3. Liz West, Our Colour, 2016.
4. Liz West, Our Spectral Vision, 2016.
5. LIz West, Double Fizz, Image: Charles Emerson.
