Solar Sculptures

Solar Clocks, El Morro, New Mexico, center sculpture, equatorial sundial.

In the spring of 1984, I participated in “Sitework: Southwest,” the first art project sponsored by Earthwatch in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The project was conceived by Joan Brigham, a graduate of CAVS at MIT, who invited five artists to live in the high desert of New Mexico for ten days with twenty Earthwatch volunteers. We then held a symposium about the project at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. For this project I made “Solar Clocks and Moon Gardens,” an installation of five timekeeping sculptures articulated by the movement of the sun and moon throughout the day and year that were placed on a 40’ in diameter circle. Based on the knowledge gained from that project I made an elaborate sun dial at Cyprus College in 1998, as part of the “Light As Substance” exhibition in which I used the concept of spherical aberration as part of the optical concept of the work.