Solar Time

by Emily Fuhrman

“I am a data artist, which means I explore the critical and expressive potential behind structured ways of understanding the physical world.

This piece is a durational cyanotype exposure of sunbeams through the window of my London flat. I prepared the papers with light-sensitive cyanotype solution, then arranged them on a west-facing wall in a 6 × 3 grid. I exposed the papers to thirty minutes of sunlight on 2024/02/01, from 12:46 to 13:16, during which the beams visibly progressed — due, of course, to the apparent movement of the sun, which impressed upon the paper directly.

The work represents the passage of time as a visible duration, ambivalent to human operational abstractions (i.e. longitude, clock time). Despite the apparent rigidity of the two overlaid grids, the ""artist"" is absent, as the sun simply impresses itself on the prepared paper. The piece therefore coheres with the theme of ""Letting Go,"" because it represents the act of relinquishing artistic agency over the final visual composition. (The sun does the work, instead.)

Fixing the interior on the surface of the earth, in relation to the sun, the visual effect is both intimate and celestial.“