Photographer: Ewelina Ruminska.
my body is a sundial
A conversation between two bodies held too close: human and celestial, ricocheting, raging and merging inside hot cities of glass, asphalt and steel.
Exploring the concept of the body not only as a record of solar time but also of solar intensity, the sculpture invites visitors to step inside the organic, sensorial container of the artist, suspended between the rejection and recovery of her relationship with our closest star. Layers of paint and drawings are trapped between transparent panes held by steel, encased memories of summers past and present.
As the sun travels overhead, new shadows, reflections and details appear and disappear, while visitors move through the inverted dial, altering the paintings and shadows through their physical presence.
Around the world, heat is fast becoming the leading cause of weather-related deaths; our bodies have not evolved to live in cities that are perfectly designed to entrap the sun, and the impacts of extreme temperatures are not felt equally.
Inspired by the environmental history research project Melting Metropolis, the artwork blends auto-ethnography undertaken in the project’s research cities (and the artist’s ancestral lands) of London, New York, and Port of Spain, Trinidad, with ‘wild drawing’ in the search for embodied understandings and expressions of how the sun shapes us, and how we shape the sun in return.
Memories and desires colour the present, articulating both pleasure and pressure, while fleeting moments of embodied clarity and dialogue illuminate the bright intensity of solar time, solar wisdom and solar warning.
behind the scenes
The Making of My Body is a Sundial and Stand of the Sun, a film by Hannah Earl, commissioned by Wellcome Discovery Award project ‘Melting Metropolis’ and supported by a University of Liverpool Higher Education Impact Funding Award.
“As the heart of our solar system moves through my mid-afternoon body, a body that dreams of dawn as dusk draws closer, the intense pressures of heat, clock-time, uncanny seasons and narrow sight-lines of how to live well, here, now, surface.
We are holding the Sun too close, and yet we need the Sun, we evolved with the Sun, our bodies contain the Sun. Is there still time to find new ways, or old ways, of being in more harmonious relationship with our closest star?
Subtle movements and minute noticings stir. Re-membering ancestral patterns, rescuing childhood awe and nurturing empathy for a body that has accompanied me throughout; a body also trapped in these cities. A body also fuel for systems distorting evolutionary cycles.”
- Bryony Ella