Twenty two storeys of origami-folded aluminium that shifts hue as you move, the Swan River's shimmer folded into a tower.

Folding Light climbs the full height of The Crest at Burswood: a ribbon of geometric, origami-folded aluminium running 68 metres up the tower's face, eleven metres wide and twenty two floors tall. The title is literal twice over. The facade is folded metal, creased into a rhythmically repeating relief, and it folds light itself, its faceted surface catching and returning the sun differently at every angle, every hour.

The concept came from the building's singular vantage. The Crest sits high on a rise, looking across Burswood Peninsula toward a distinctive neck-bend in the Swan River, and residents on the upper levels live with those meandering waters in constant view. Contemplation of that water body, its tidal fluctuations in level and the endless movement of its surface, informed an abstracted rhythmic pattern developed through an extensive, iterative design phase, a design that translates between two and three dimensions into one compelling physical geometry.

The material finish carries the water metaphor beyond resemblance into behaviour. The artwork is clad in a spectra finish that shimmers, shifts and changes hue as the viewer's position and angle of sight vary, reflecting different wavelengths of light back to the eye in an ever-changing gradient. Like the river seen from above, the facade never holds a single colour: it is gold, then bronze, then rose, depending on where you stand and where the sun sits. The artwork does not depict water surface ripples in changing light; it performs them, at the scale of a tower.

As with all of the artists' work, the piece is completed by motion. Drivers rounding the rise, pedestrians below, residents returning home: each approach plays the folds differently, shadow deepening and dissolving across the creases through the day. The result is a considered response to the phenomenon of changing light and shadow, a facade in constant quiet performance with no moving parts and no power required.

At street level, a second artwork grounds the tower: a woodlook timber finished aluminium slatted screen wrapping the podium, 7.2 metres high and 42 metres long, its shallow relief catching light and shadow at walking pace. Together the two works give The Crest a presence that reads from the skyline to the footpath, the river's geometry folded into the building at every scale.