Jill Anholt’s public artworks invite viewers into poetic encounters with site, memory, and material. Her practice continues to evolve through thoughtful engagement with landscape, architecture, and light.
Vancouver-based visual artist Jill Anholt has been reimagining public spaces across North America since 1998, creating site-specific installations that transform ordinary environments into experiential encounters with place and history. Her diverse portfolio spans from complex integrated works in parks, civic spaces, and transportation hubs to intimate installations in buildings, sidewalks, and public plazas, each designed to reveal the hidden narratives embedded within place.
Anholt's practice centers on uncovering what she describes as the "hidden stories, systems and qualities of a particular place," weaving these discoveries into dynamic spatial installations that invite active engagement. Her work operates at the intersection of built and natural environments, examining how viewers physically and emotionally respond to carefully orchestrated interventions. This approach creates artworks that are not merely viewed but experienced, fostering intimate dialogues between the installation and its audience.
Anholt's works are strongly rooted within their specific contexts, yet they seek to reframe viewers' experiences of their surroundings by revealing invisible natural systems and transforming how people move through and perceive everyday spaces. Central to her methodology is an investigation of temporal qualities—contrasting permanent elements with ephemeral ones, examining how light, movement, and perception shift our understanding of the environment. She intends to intrigue passers-by, drawing them to look closer at the work itself, and by extension, explore and discover connections and meaning embodied in place and time.
This methodology is exemplified across several major works. In Aperture for a Fine Arts building, she employed reflective chrome frit interlayer in the glazing system to create a dynamic, painterly impression of the unseen Spokane River's vortices and flows. The work captures reflections of changing sky intermixed with interior activities, constantly transforming based on the viewer's perspective, time of day, and lighting conditions.
Her award-winning Sea Change installation transforms a dark transit tunnel in North Vancouver into an immersive underwater experience. The interactive light-based artwork celebrates the area's waterfront connection by marking the historic tideline within the site, serving as a symbolic reminder of water's importance to humanity. Using LED lights reflecting off textured mirror-polished stainless-steel panels positioned at specific angles, the work creates dynamic light patterns that mimic being immersed within a body of water. When unoccupied, the tunnel displays gentle shifting turquoise colors, but when pedestrians or cyclists enter, waves of intense blue or green light ripple across the walls in front of them. The installation won the Transportation category of the 2021 CODAwards.
SubSupra brings the Willamette River's underwater terrain to shore as a 60-foot-long sculptural canopy that immerses visitors in an undulating overhead experience. Composed of painted and mirror-polished stainless steel with LED lighting, the work pulls dynamic reflections of the river's patterns, colors. It flows into a dramatic gathering space at the water's edge. All of Anholt's works intend to create connections between people and between people and place through surprising moments of discovery, revelation, and transformation.
Recognition for Anholt's innovative approach has come through national and international awards. A four-time CODAawards winner (2017, 2019, 2021, 2022), her project "Sea Change" in North Vancouver won in the transportation category, while many of her works have been recognized for their innovation and successful role in placemaking and community building.
What distinguishes Anholt's installations is their capacity to reframe viewers' experiences of familiar environments. Rather than imposing foreign elements onto existing spaces, her works emerge from careful study of context, creating surprising moments of discovery that draw attention to the world around us in unexpected ways. These interventions become catalysts for transformation, not just of physical spaces but of human perception and connection.
Through her site-responsive approach, Anholt creates bridges between people, between communities and their environments, and between the visible and hidden aspects of place. Her installations serve as invitations to pause, observe, and rediscover the extraordinary within the everyday, fulfilling her ultimate intention of fostering connections through art that surprises, reveals, and transforms.
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