Solar Art

Art is in large part a language of light. One of the many things that have always fascinated me about sundials is the fact that they are incomplete without a shadow. Another part of their fascination for me is the inherent beauty of scientific instruments.

Let us briefly contemplate the ineluctable beauty of certain man-made forms. All forms made by nature have their undeniable beauty, but what comes from our human hands has a range of beauty from the prosaic to the poetic. As a class of objects, I think that nothing exceeds musical instruments in aesthetic fascination. And it must be so, because their shapes derive from their power to shape the energy of sound.

In my estimation, scientific instruments take a close second place to musical instruments in their inherent beauty, because they take their shape from their power to arrange all manner of energy—atomic, chemical, biological, electrical, mechanical, gravitational, and so on.

Great solar time markers like Stonehenge in England and Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon have captivated my imagination because they are neither sculpture, temple, nor observatory, but rather are a nearly unfathomable combination of all three.

I have been drawn to making “sundials,” or what I prefer to call Solar Sculptures, by my abiding preoccupation with the connections among science, art, and spirituality.