Artists create massive sculpture made from thousands of eyeglass lenses

If you happen to be in Turkey right now, don't forget to drop by the famous Pera Museum. Aside from its wondrous Ottoman artworks, you will be delighted to see a vast sculpture fashioned from thousands of used eyeglass lenses.

   The nine-meter wide kinetic installation, titled sea/see/saw, hangs in the front of the historic building in Istanbul. It was created by Canadian artists Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett using 14,000 lenses from discarded eyewear. The two were looking for something translucent so that it wouldn't cover up the museum facade, and came up with the idea of using eyeglasses to create pixilated ripples across the front of the building, as drawn by the wind.

   The shimmering sculpture, which is on display until January next year, has been designed to mimic the way the light dances on the surface of the Golden Horn, the major urban waterway and the primary inlet of the Bosphorus in the city.

   "It has a really sort of delicate, elegant quality that we weren't necessarily intending but we're quite pleased with, and we had a few people ask us if it was made of Swarovski crystals as when you're at ground level it takes a minute to realize what the material is," says Garrett.