public engagement

my body is a sundial

Building upon her own autoethnography and Drawing Heat research, Bryony Ella has built a sculptural installation that explores her own relationship to the sun through embodied drawing and painting. It considers the body as a record of solar intensity, engaging the sun in dialogue as it visits the project’s research cities (and Ella’s ancestral lands) of London, New York, and Port of Spain, Trinidad. My Body is a Sundial is currently on display in the Cultural Reforesting exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in London.

About the artwork:

My Body is a Sundial is a conversation between two bodies held too close. Human and celestial bodies, ricocheting, raging and merging between hot cities of glass, asphalt and steel. The sculpture invites visitors to step inside the organic, ancestral, sensorial container of the artist, suspended between the rejection and recovery of her relationship with our closest star. 

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 is a search for embodied understandings and expressions of how the sun shapes us, and how we shape the sun in return. 

“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 sightlines of how to live well, here, now, surface. Yet, subtle movements and minute noticings stir here, too. Re-membering ancestral patterns. Rescuing childhood awe. Stirring empathy for a body that is also trapped in these cities, and also fuel for systems distorting evolutionary cycles.” - Bryony Ella