British Council India and Public Arts Trust of India (PATI) are presenting the light installation Tiered Reflections (2025) by British artist Liz West at the British Council in New Delhi, India. Tiered Reflections is on view from February 5 – 26, 2025; it opened right before the start of India Art Fair 2025. It is a touring art installation that was first shown during Jodhpur Arts Week 2024: Special Projects Edition, which ran from October 15 – 21, 2024. The project was curated by Emma Sumner, director, PATI (which was founded by Sana Rezwan), and Sakhshi Mahajan, contemporary art curator, Jodhpur Arts Week. Tiered Reflections intervened in the facade of Jodhpur’s historic Toorji ka Jhalra (Toorji’s Stepwell), which is a prominent tourist attraction and a gathering point for Jodhpur locals. Samta Nadeem, curatorial director, STIR, sat down with West to discuss the project and her larger practice.

What I want to do is simply get people to look up. We all live in this world where we're obsessed with technology on our phones, and therefore, we're always looking down. So I want to create these immersive kaleidoscopic environments that make people look harder. – Liz West, visual artist

Tiered Reflections is a light art piece that is composed of many coloured acrylic square mirrors attached to polycarbonate stands. The mirror panels reflect the ambient lighting of their surroundings, which results in a kaleidoscopic environment that envelops viewers in light.

West has Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which causes seasonal depression, typically during winter in the United Kingdom. She is driven to work with colour and light because they support human happiness. She also wishes to create spaces that prompt her audience to disengage with digital devices and instead experience a sense of wonderment. In the words of the visual artist, “What I want to do is simply get people to look up. We all live in this world where we're obsessed with technology on our phones, and therefore, we're always looking down. So I want to create these immersive kaleidoscopic environments that make people look harder.”

Tiered Reflections iterates on West’s earlier work, Our Colour Reflection (2016 – 2020), which was shown in Bangalore in 2019 for the Bengaluru ByDesign Festival. The key difference between Our Colour Reflection and Tiered Reflections is that the former artwork featured circular rather than square mirrors. West explains that the difference in effect is minimal, and she was guided by a desire to respond to the architecture of Toorji ka Jhalra rather than to produce a different visual effect. In her words, “When I knew that my work was going to the stepwell, and I looked at videos and photographs of it, the overwhelming sense was that it was a square pattern…it didn’t feel like a very circle-based place.”

Toorji ka Jhalra was built in the 1740s under the patronage of Raani Tawarji (Queen Tawarji), a consort of Jodhpur’s king Maharaja Abhay Singh. The queen modelled the stepwell on those found in her home kingdom of Patan, Gujarat. The historic building is composed of an inner area featuring arches and windows on one side and alternating sets of angled and straight steps running down the other three. Engravings of prancing elephants, lions and cows—commonly found in India—run across the walls of the well, along with inlets containing idols of Hindu gods and goddesses. The entire structure is carved out of red sandstone, which is characteristic of Indian architecture in Jodhpur.

Tiered Reflections is an example of how an immersive environment can be created using older methods rather than cutting-edge technologies. In a time when artists are increasingly turning to Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to build complex worlds, this artwork instead harkens back to a sense of childlike wonderment found in playing with light and mirrors. In its Jodhpur iteration, the work also brought a new, kaleidoscopic dimension to the historic site it was installed in, enthralling audiences attending the art week in Jodhpur. To quote Ruchira Das, Director Arts at British Council India, "Liz West's Tiered Reflections is a powerful testament to how art transcends boundaries, connecting heritage with contemporary expressions. We are delighted to bring this reimagined artwork to the heart of Delhi, at our cultural centre, offering a unique and immersive  experience that fosters new artistic dialogue and connections between the UK and India."

‘Tiered Reflections’ is on view at the British Council India, KG Marg, New Delhi, from February 5 – 26, 2025.