Bryony Ella: My Body is a Sundial

(How) do our (urban) bodies hold the sun?

‘My Body is a Sundial’ is a conversation between two bodies held too close. Human and celestial bodies, ricocheting, raging and merging between hot cities of glass, asphalt and steel. The sculpture invites you to step inside the organic, ancestral, sensorial container of the artist, suspended between the rejection and recovery of her relationship with our closest star.

“As the heart of our solar system moves through my mid-afternoon body, a body that dreams of dawn as dusk draws closer, the intense pressures of heat, clock-time, uncanny seasons and narrow sightlines of how to live well, here, now, surface. Yet, subtle movements and minute noticings stir here, too. Re-membering my ancestral patterns. Rescuing my childhood awe. Stirring empathy for a body that has accompanied me throughout. One that is also trapped in these cities. One that is also fuel for systems distorting our evolutionary cycles.”

Bryony Ella

Inspired by the international environmental history project Melting Metropolis, which studies the lived experience and climate injustice of urban heat islands, ‘My Body is a Sundial’ engages the sun in embodied dialogue as it visits the project’s research cities (and the artist’s ancestral lands) of London, New York, and Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Expressing the tension between yearning to live in a state of reverence for the sun and the dangers of extreme urban heat, fleeting moments of clarity illuminate the bright intensity of solar power, wisdom and warning. We are holding the sun too close, and yet we need the sun, we evolved with the sun, our bodies contain the sun. ‘My Body is a Sundial’ asks: whose stories need to be felt now, and can we release them in time?

Bryony’s research into our relationship with the sun is also influenced by her Cultural Reforesting residency through her ‘Wild Drawing’ practice. She spent three months in the Orleans House Gallery grounds researching the practice of drawing of, with and as part of nature and in participation with others. She suspended canvas hangings between trees in our woodland and painted the light and shadows as they moved with brush and found natural objects.

‘My Body is a Sundial’ is commissioned by Melting Metropolis, a Wellcome Discovery Award project at the University of Liverpool.

 Melting Metropolis is funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award and runs from 2023 to 2029, based at the University of Liverpool, Wellcome and Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY).