“WHEN you’re working with light, you end up shaping everything around it” says American artist James Turrell, whose work is the subject of the National Gallery of Australia’s most unusual blockbuster ever.

“James Turrell: a retrospective” opens on Saturday, December 13 and the exhibition’s Australian curator, Lucina Ward, has described her encounter with the artist as “life changing”.

The idea of staging a Turrell exhibition at the NGA has been around since 2006 or 2007, developed as the gallery made key acquisitions, notably his 2010 Skyspace, “Within without”.

Some people, Ward says, may only know him as the eccentric who owns a crater in Arizona, but now they’re going to experience his work.

The show seems almost impossible to describe, since Turrell’s medium, light, is not something you can grasp in your hands.

The coming show has elements of sell-out exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Guggenheim in New York. Ours will be the second largest, after LACMA, and it’s seen Ward dashing across the Pacific three times in the past 18 months. Turrell has been here four or five times, too, and will be in town this week to talk about his work.

Talking about Turrell’s work is one thing, but experiencing it is something quite different. “Much of the work is hidden,” Ward says.

Ward says there are 50 works, including 10 large installations, projection pieces, built spaces, holograms, drawings, prints and photographs.

And are some of the huge spaces in Colin Madigan’s National Gallery building particularly well-suited to Turrell’s work?

Ward tells me the late Madigan had made disparaging remarks about  Skyspace and that “Turrell’s work is about blocking off architecture”, but indeed the enormous space in Gallery 3, with 16 metres width and 8 metres in height to use, allows a huge “Ganzfeld”, perhaps the largest ever.

Much of this has been under wraps for months, exciting the curiosity of passers-by, but the space is now ready. “Ganzfeld”, in case you wonder, is German for “entire field” and involves  a technique of perceptual deprivation drawn from parapsychology, which Turrell studied in his youth along with mathematics and astronomy.

A featureless field of vision will be suffused with light, Ward explains, but just as in outer space there are no corners and curves.

“The human eye likes to attach itself to something,” Ward says, “so the whole effect of Turrell’s installations is “discombobulating… you step into a large coloured square, but then you take off your shoes and you move into the space beyond the colour.”

We can expect to feel a rich gold warmth, but at times it’s icy-cold as the light cycle moves on and it affects the physical body. Ward likens it to walking on clouds.

“You have to slide, you have to feel with your feet…it’s very intriguing, people are drawn to Turrell’s work, but it’s not a matter of viewing, it’s a matter of experiencing,” she says.

“I can’t tell you how it will be for you, but I can tell you how it affects me… it brings the viewer into the unknown.”

Most of these experiences will be safe for viewers, except in the immersive installation “The Perceptual Cell”, which can only accommodate one viewer at a time every 15 minutes. There Turrell has used strobe, with a warning for people suffering from epilepsy.

As for changing Ward’s life, curating the show has been an all-consuming project.

“I feel myself the physical effects on me, on my eye as a seeing entity,” she says.

“James Turrell: a retrospective”, at the National Gallery of Australia, from December 13, timed entry sessions with limited capacity. Bookings to 1300 795012.