Sun Dials

I made the first tracing of a sun shadow last summer in Portugal, on site at the old paint factory where I was on residency. I think it’s an impulse of many, the light being so bright, to make contact with the movement of the sun. I taped up rolls of brown craft paper to the wall, underneath the shapes of light, and began to trace. With that first drawing I learned that the shadow moved more sideways than upwards, in a sauntering, horizontal movement.

Last spring, in the tepid gray weather of March in Ohio, I decided to make more tracings, and turn them into quilts.

This summer I began. The act of making the patterns surprised me. I did not expect to be in such a hurry or the light to move so swiftly. It only took a span of five minutes or a cloud moving over the sun to miss a particular time and shape I wanted to trace-- 8am just before Charlie woke up, 7:45, just before bathtime.

Sun dials are visual timekeepers, tracking the slow passage of time. The object affixed to the sun dial that the sun casts against is called a gnomon or style. The light falls against the gnomon, breaking a shadow onto the dial.nThough the earth orbits sun in an elliptical path, light travels in straight lines.

The shape of a shadow usually mirrors the shape of the object that casts it, marking the space where the light cannot reach. In making the tracings, I was trying to capture the opposite thing, the inverse thing, the light that makes its way through a formed environment (my home).

I tried to give it different names: light shadows, light casts, sun shadows. I realize now it is a matter of place and proximity, of interior and exterior, of scale and proportion. Outside, I’m the lone figure, the sun casts against me a dark shadow on the ground. When I’m inside, the sun is spun through my house’s negative spaces, proof of the exterior world creeping in. Our house is (or am I?) the gnomon.

I imagine myself and my house miniaturized, light pouring into it like a pinhole camera. In the slowness of mothering, I see myself from a hundred feet above, a bird’s eye view of me and Charlie, in our small blue house.

Charlie now tracks the sun (and the moon), always noticing the dappled pattern of light on the wall reflecting off his chair at the kitchen table. He asks where the sun goes when it is blocked from his view by houses on our street, or when the sunlight shifts away from him when we are driving. It’s just behind the houses, I say. Behind the trees, behind the building, it’s there.

Tracing the light feels something akin to bird watching, an act that gathers sensory information to find and define oneself in time and space. I think of it as identifying a sense of belonging, orienting oneself to a particular place or landscape, or finding a posture by which to relate to it.

Proximity is closeness, nearness in time, space, relationship. The sun shines into the window of my home from 93 million miles away, a number that means nothing to me in its enormity (it is large and makes me feel infinitely and infinitesimally small, and it is too much work to map or make concrete that kind of distance in my mind). I wonder how this sunlight, brimming with time, has traversed outer space and stretched out in languorous, sharp edged shapes onto my dining room wall at lunchtime, as I feed my son a slice of lasagna one small bite at a time.