Heliographs
2018
Solar burned wood, glass sphere, aluminum. Each 6” x 10” diam. (15 cm x 25 cm diam.).
Created for deployment at the South Pole in the austral summer of 2016/17. Each Heliograph creates a transcription of the sun’s passage. The Heliographs conform to a precise geometry so that the sun’s light and heat is focused to a point – much like a camera body does for its attached lens. The sun doesn't rise or set at the South Pole in the summer, so it burns a closed circular path inside the Heliograph over a 24-hour period. The burn is an artefact of the lense’s operation, with its own unique characteristics. There are 24 segments in each Heliograph and so it takes an hour for the sun to cross each segment. The Heliograph is at once a camera, a timepiece, a photographic plate, an inverted model of the sky, and an indexical artefact of my fieldwork at the South Pole.