Spoonful, Netherlands

Spoonful is a site-specific light sculpture commissioned by Amsterdam Light Festival in response to the open-call theme Rituals. The work celebrates one of the most enduring and cross-cultural human rituals: gathering to share a meal.

Across societies, eating together is more than nourishment. It is a gesture of care, trust, and belonging – an everyday act through which communities form and sustain themselves, particularly during winter. Spoonful translates this intimate domestic ritual into the public realm, using light to transform the city’s canal into a shared, symbolic space.

The sculpture takes the form of a giant spoon gently dipping into the water, as if scooping up a spoonful of the canal itself. By shifting scale and perspective, the work invites viewers to perceive the city as a collective table: a shared bowl of soup or cup of tea offered to residents and visitors alike. The canal, long a connector of Amsterdam’s neighbourhoods and histories, becomes a metaphor for communal hospitality and exchange.

Visually, the project seeks a balance between monumentality and restraint. At over six metres long, the spoon is large enough to register across the urban landscape, yet it is reduced to its most essential contours. Through an iterative design process, the form was distilled to a minimal luminous outline – just enough information for instant recognition. The result is a glowing silhouette.

Light is treated as both material and atmosphere. The sculpture is outlined using continuous tubular light, chosen for its gentle form factor and even emission. A warm colour temperature evokes interior warmth during winter evenings while contrasting with the cool exterior environment. Part of the luminous contour extends below the waterline, allowing the spoon to appear partially submerged. This underwater glow is essential to the illusion of scooping, reinforcing the metaphor while creating subtle reflections and refractions across the canal’s surface.

Technical decisions were driven by visual discretion. The light needed to appear continuous and self-supporting, without visible fixings that would interrupt the silhouette. Working with lighting specialists OneEightyOne, an IP-rated tubular lighting solution was identified that could withstand outdoor and submerged conditions while maintaining a soft, uniform glow. The luminous outline is supported by a bespoke steel structure fabricated by Leeuwarden-based metal specialists Mannen Van Staal, whose expertise in precision bending allowed the frame to remain almost invisible.

To preserve the clarity of the gesture, the sculpture is anchored to the canal bed rather than floating. This submerged support structure, developed in collaboration with the festival’s technical coordination, allows the spoon to hover calmly above the water, resisting movement and visual noise.

Spoonful does not ask for interaction or instruction. Instead, it offers a quiet, collective image – an invitation to pause and to share a moment of warmth in public space. Through light, scale, and metaphor, the work proposes ritual not as spectacle, but as something simple and familiar.