Sunrise, sunset
By Tom Howells
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An affecting installation draws the viewer through a day’s worth of beatific solar energy.
Marjan van Aubel has long been obsessed with the Sun. Back in 2012, the Dutch designer – now established and wildly feted for her pioneering work in solar design – was working on her graduation project at London’s RCA when she came across a batch of vividly hued solar cells. “They were transparent and coloured,” she explains. “It was the first time I saw that solar energy could be beautiful. From that moment, I started implementing it into different objects: glassware, tables, light installations, buildings. Now, I see all surfaces as a potential to harvest energy.”
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“The Sun is something holistic; we can feel it.”
Following more than a decade’s worth of increasingly compelling design work channelling solar energy’s transformative socio-cultural potential, ‘The Sun, My Heart’ sees a natural progression for Van Aubel’s practice. A celestial installation within Somerset House’s New Wing, the piece – one of LDF24’s Landmark Projects, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies – comprises 77 of the designer’s self-powering, pill-shaped Sunne lamps, suspended in space and evoking the Sun’s daily journey. Of these, 24 represent the burning orb itself, the remainder its emanating rays.
On one side of each lamp is a solar panel, powering a light source on the other, mimicking the Sun’s three settings of sunrise, sunlight and sunset, in tones of pink, yellow and orange. Over eight minutes and 20 seconds, the installation moves through the Sun’s cycle. A carefully crafted soundscape based on Nasa’s recordings of the Sun’s natural vibrations – a surprisingly immersive ambient mono-drone – accompanies the shifting patterns, designed to trigger theta brain waves and induce a profound state of meditative relaxation. (The name ‘The Sun, My Heart’, Van Aubel explains, was derived from a text by the Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, activist and writer Thích Nhất Hạnh; it’s a prompt to “open up one’s heart to this new connection”.)
Visitors can more fully embed themselves in the work via a tactile sensor on a pedestal that registers pressure and presence, triggering a personal sun experience that changes colour. “Depending on the touch, the connection one makes, it's going to be unique,” says Van Aubel.
“We get the sun in so much abundance,” she continues of the deeper context behind ‘The Sun, My Heart’. “It’s very clear that we need to move to solar energy, but the way it’s going now is a very technical approach. We shouldn’t only talk about numbers and efficiency. The Sun is something holistic; we can feel it. We need beauty and design to make us want to change things. We need to feel it inside.”
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While objectively beautiful and not a little ruminative in its sensory heft, this piece is also intended to be a catalyst for change, tonally chiming with LDF24’s wider theme of prompting answers to global challenges through the emotional connections inherently generated through meticulous, innovative design.
Therein lies the crux for Van Aubel. “Solar energy should become more emotional, more human, more social, more aesthetic,” she says, emphatically. “That’s the aim of my work.”
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