There Is Only One Sun 2021

There Is Only One Sun 2020

wood, metal, mylar

175 x 200 x 100cm

​

There is a scene in Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” where the main character climbs down an old dried-up well. Suffering from the turmoil of his wife unexpectedly leaving him, Okada enters a long journey of self-reflection and existential contemplation. During these isolated hours at the bottom of the well he questions his physical and psychological being; entrenched in the vast darkness he can no longer make out the shape of his hands in front of himself. As the hours pass, he notes that by the movement of the sun, he gains a mere few seconds of light every day; seconds of warmth whereby he can confirm his existence.

 

I am entranced by the mirrored ephemerality of explicit memory and sunlight. For my project, I want to explore memory and the existentialism of ageing in relation to the human skin and sunlight. The skin has the ability to record explicit memory and simultaneously encapsulate the fleetingness of time itself, whilst sunlight; an omniscient presence is the main factor of ageing. I also want to discuss the permanence of the entity that is the sun; a presence so sure, so giving, yet undeniably impermanent.

 

I built a three-piece structure containing a concave mirror, sunshade, and a wooden frame to execute my ideas. The concave mirror will focus and reflect the sunlight into a single point, during specific times of the day, the light will pass by the sunshade and burn the wood on the other side for a moment. With the movement of the sun, the result will be a single, short marking on the wood. I capture the movement of something monumental, focusing its majesty and containing its energy. Consequently, this act mirrors the way our skin records fleeting but explicit memories. Like wrinkles, scars and sunburns, each leaves a mark on our skin, embedded and immortalised on our vessels.