What is nature? (and where is it?) Does it (even) exist? And have we (ever) been natural?
Works by Alvaro Urbano - click on image for more.

Does fake nature, or images of nature, make us yearn for the real thing, and if so, what do we imagine the real thing to be? Works by Julius von Bismarck - click on image for more

Little Sun has been nominated for a Billion Acts Hero Award by Billion Acts - a global organization led by 14 Nobel Peace Prize Winners including The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Please support them by voting here: https://www.billionacts.org/hero-awards-voting

Reading list #studio #research
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Corners and Curves - carrot stamping, acrylic and watercolor on canvas - by artist Jesper Dyrehauge. His primary working tool is carrot stamping - a way of re-negotiating prevalent conceptions of painting. Carrot stamping is a way of thinking through making; an embracing and reconfiguring of material and form, in which the outcome is partly conceived, but can never be fully known. This series was conceived on a residency in Los Angeles. “Sunlight became a critical mediator of my relationship with los angeles – a mediator which has the potential to produce new ways of thinking about color, form and the idea of the ‘fade'. LA is a contrasting study of color. the matte and polished colors of this city – deep and vibrant blues of the ocean and of the skies which reflect it, bright greens of overwatered lawns – sat in opposition to the bleached colors of the city's dyed relics – its cars, signs, buildings. when i entered people’s homes, i was often surprised to find the interiors dark, almost gloomy. rooms often had small windows with thick curtains, to keep out the hard bite of the sun. coming from denmark where sunlight is celebrated, i had never felt the need to curtain my windows. In LA the sun is not always a welcome stranger, but sometimes hostile. sun in los angeles is persistent, beating more aggressively than in northern europe. it bleaches all that it touches: old cars at the side of the road, resting in chipped and faded paint with custom made covers to protect their wrinkled dashboards from the sun; street signs and painted buildings fading in the force of the sun. these faded hues were not gaps in a chromatic vocabulary, but offered a whole new language of color. Fading is so often couched as a 'loss' of color: a dissolution of vibrancy, a bleaching of form. but, my experience in LA began to put this idea of the 'fade' into question. when color fades, it doesn’t disappear, but is transformed as a new color. colors are poetic, rather than grammatic – a faded color is not a color lost, but a color that has gained another texture. fading, i realised, can also be another path for growth." www.jesperdyrehauge.net

On-going research: Targeting rays on a spherical polyhedron built from kaleidoscopes. To influence light reflection, we have been looking into variations of mirror sphere-like shapes built from kaleidoscopes and mirrors. A challenge is finding the right structure based on geometrical symmetry that will then reflect light less randomly. We have been testing different structural designs by applying polyhedron geometry, but also investigating concave stellations of the Rhombic Triacontahedron. The use of parabolic concave mirrors helps to limit random reflection and by adjusting the orientation of specific mirrors, we can in a sense control the behavior of light.

The unspeakable openness of things, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing. Photo: Roman Pilipey

If national identity or collective memory is seen as the result of a collection of representations, then it’s never too late to add to and improve on this narrative. I am Queen Mary - is a very good place to start this dialogue. The new, hopefully permanent statue is a monument of a rebel woman that challenges Denmark’s „forgotten“ colonial past (and the first public sculpture of a black woman in Denmark (!) Denmark’s past as a colonial power and slave nation is often overlooked in the narrative the country tells itself and others. Until 100 years ago the caribbean islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix og St. Jan were under danish rule. Mary Thomas was a leader of the ‘Fireburn’ labour revolt on St. Croix. The Fireburn began on October 1, 1878 as an uprising against the contractual servitude that continued to bind workers to the plantation system after the 1848 abolition of slavery in the former Danish West Indies. Created by the artists Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers and Virgin Islands artist La Vaughn Belle - they hope to challenge Denmark’s role in slavery, its colonial past and memorialize those who fought against it. The statue occupies the waterfront by Copenhagen’s West Indian Warehouse that stored sugar, rum and other goods produced in Denmark’s former Caribbean colonies. This temporary sculpture is the first part of an endeavour to raise a permanent bronze monument in the same location. Go visit in Copenhagen or on www.iamqueenmary.com

Studio roof top: A sun tracker is an instrument that redirects sunlight onto a fixed point by adjusting a mirror in concert with the ‘movement’ of the sun across the sky. In development at the studio for a number of years, the apparatus belongs to a family of optical devices called heliostats – a word deriving from Greek roots that mean stationary sun. In a sense to track the sun is to track yourself, because the sun tracker locates the centre of your orbital ellipse, giving your position right now and rendering visible your path. The reflexive potential lies in understanding that we are in a way the mirrors, circulating, tracking, spinning in our Keplerian ellipses. You and I are not the centre of the universe, but in fact spinning in altruistic space

Excerpt from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit - in the new studio book, Open House