Image (top): Sculpture at Orleans House Gallery, Photographer Anne Tetzlaff, 2025, Image (right): detail, My Body is a Sundial
my body is a sundial
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 visitors to step inside the organic, ancestral, sensorial container of the artist, suspended between the rejection and recovery of her relationship with our closest star.
Around the world, heat is fast becoming the leading cause of weather-related deaths; our bodies have not evolved to live in cities that are perfectly designed to entrap the sun, and the impacts of extreme temperatures are not felt equally. Inspired by the environmental history research project Melting Metropolis, the artwork blends autoethnography with ‘wild drawing’ in the search for embodied understandings and expressions of how the sun shapes us, and how we shape the sun in return.
“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; also trapped in these cities. Also fuel for systems that are distorting our evolutionary cycles.” - Bryony Ella
As Research Artist with the international environmental history project Melting Metropolis, which studies studying every day, lived experiences of urban heat islands, Bryony Ella explores the concept of the body as a record of solar intensity, engaging the sun in dialogue as it visits the project’s research cities (and Ella’s ancestral lands) of London, New York, and Port of Spain, Trinidad.
My Body is a Sundial expresses the bodily-felt tension between yearning to live in a state of reverence and respect for sun, and the very real danger of living within cities that are perfectly designed to entrap its heat. Memories and desires colour the present, articulating both the pleasures and pressures of living with the sun, while fleeting moments of embodied clarity and dialogue illuminate the bright intensity of solar time, solar wisdom and solar warning. We are holding the Sun too close, and yet we need the Sun, we evolved with the Sun, our bodies contain the Sun. Can we find new ways, or old ways, of being in relationship with our closest star? What stories are waiting to be released and whose voice needs to be heard now?
The artwork is commissioned by Melting Metropolis, a Wellcome Discovery Award research project at the University of Liverpool, and launches as part of the Cultural Reforesting exhibition at Orleans House Gallery, London, 27.0.25 - 31.08.25.