A10.5 metre landmark celebrating the city's Riverfire Festival, a stylised poinsettia bloom created by artist Luke Roberts that blazes to life after dark above Brisbane's CBD.
Poinsettia Riverfire is Brisbane’s floral emblem cast in steel and light. Created by celebrated Queensland artist Luke Roberts in 2016, the 10.5 metre sculpture stands in Emma Miller Place in the heart of the CBD, its lotus-like form reaching skyward as a nod to the city’s annual Riverfire Festival. Brisbane City Council, working with public art consultants Blue Sky View, engaged Digilin to bring the sculpture’s lighting system back to full strength.
The brief
The existing housing needed a lighting retrofit capable of bold, saturated colour with none of the dot artefacts common in lower grade LED product, all while surviving permanent outdoor exposure and running unattended from sunset to sunrise, every night of the year.
The solution
Digilin custom designed and manufactured a fully bespoke round RGBW lighting component to retrofit the sculpture’s existing flower bud housings, engineered to match the artist’s original design intent exactly rather than adapting an off the shelf product. Along the leaf structures, Digilin’s HaloFlex IP68 flexible luminaires with RGBW output were installed, chosen for their dot-free finish and their ability to trace the sculpture’s curves without a single visible join. Digilin’s engineering team then programmed a Pharos control system to run a rotating sequence of animated, colour changing light shows, adjustable on request for festivals and civic events.
The challenges
Cable reticulation through the sculpture’s tight internal spaces was one of the toughest technical problems on site, made harder again by the length of individual runs. Long cable lengths bring their own electrical considerations, voltage drop, circuit protection and correct cable sizing all had to be worked through so every fixture group received a clean, stable supply regardless of its distance from the panel. Digilin mapped every route and circuit before fabrication began, so each run could be threaded through the structure and powered correctly without rework once installation started.
Site access was tightly controlled for the duration of the project. Digilin co-ordinated every inspection and check directly with Brisbane City Council and Blue Sky View, scheduling site visits around approved windows to keep the work moving without disrupting the public space around it.
Realising the artist’s original vision was a constant test, not a one-off task. Digilin worked closely with Blue Sky View to test and refine colour, sequencing and tempo against Luke Roberts’ intent, adjusting the Pharos programming until the choreography matched the design brief exactly.
Space at the base of the sculpture was tight and access limited. Digilin engineered a compact, purpose built panel to house the drivers, controllers and power supplies together, keeping the entire system serviceable from one accessible point despite the constraints.
Poinsettia Riverfire is also a fully exposed outdoor installation, standing through Brisbane’s heavy seasonal rainfall and some of the harshest UV exposure in the country. Digilin specified IP68 rated HaloFlex throughout the leaf structures, engineered to keep water out of every joint and connection and to resist the sun damage that causes lower grade outdoor fixtures to fade, crack or fail well before their time.
The result
From sunset to sunrise, Poinsettia Riverfire now cycles through choreographed light sequences that shift in tone and tempo, echoing the colour and energy of the fireworks it was built to celebrate. It stands again as one of Brisbane’s clearest examples of lighting as place-making.
