THE SHADOW OF A CEASELESS SUN
Adam Ford
What was the first clock if not an upright stick driven into the ground? At the dawn of the morning sun, this lowly stick threw its shadow long to the west, and when the sun was setting in the afternoon, long to the east. At midday, the shadow fell short to the north, so that its diminishing segmented the day into sequential lots that we might term ‘time’. Of course, nature’s temporal divisions were already intuited and named by early humans. We observed that the moon waxed and waned and that the sun both rose and retired. Celestial bodies, which we assembled into constellations, gave rhyme to reason, and their discrete movements across the sky measured out a grand chronology. We brokered ‘time’ into acts, seasons of two, maybe three, now a standardised four, but sometimes six or seven.[1] Heat led to cold, drought to deluge, and after hunger always returned harvest. So attuned to this cyclical sense of time were we that our social lives were organised into the same sequential lots. With one stick—that first clock—we oriented ourselves around nature’s timely rhythms. We gazed upon the sun and watched the shadow of its light throw the day against our verticality into further divisions: seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, years. Our temporal order remains based on these divisions; time is but the shadow of a ceaseless sun.
In the major public artwork Sun Stadium 2024, Bundjalung (Aboriginal) and Ngāpuhi (Māori) artist-dancer-choreographer Amrita Hepi intervenes upon this ceaseless sun’s shadow to proffer a place where time is marked as at once solar, deep, circular, and local. Commissioned by The University of Queensland’s UQ Arts for the inauguration of the revitalised UQ Lakes and Amphitheatre Precinct, Sun Stadium discerns the sun as an element essential not only in the governance of time but also in the equilibrium of all living things: the land, sea, sky, and every inhabitant. Hepi’s discernment of a life-giving and sustaining sun coalesces culture and Country and their immemorial indivisibility. To properly consider Sun Stadium’s UQ locale, Hepi worked in collaboration with Dialogue Office’s Christopher Bassi (Meriam/Yupungathi), Five Mile Radius, Sibling Architecture, and with her poet friend Jazz Money (Wiradjuri). Hepi ensembled the commission’s producers into a chorus line, so that each contributor was choreographed into creative synchronisation. She makes like she moves–that is, with an understanding that people cannot be choreographed out of their interrelations with others, which depend upon a shared equivalence. Nor can they be choreographed out of place: out of a location, site, order, position, or responsibility. Tendering both the logic and a politics of First Nations’ cultural and creative practice, namely, the interdependence of people and place, Hepi gives to the public a monument with which First Peoples are honoured as those at the first dawn and those whose shadows first threw time across this wide land into all manner of being and becoming.
Though not easily emptied of its many complexities, Sun Stadium is, in its most apparent construction, a sundial: a solar clock that choreographs the sun’s movement through public participation. In the protohistory of sundials, that lowly, upright, stick was refined into a divining rod, known to Ancient Greeks by way of Ancient Mesopotamians as ‘gnomon’, the ‘raised shadow-casting rod.’ Erected onto a horizontal plate, this stick–cum-gnomon sharpened its shadow into more precise allotments, which, over time, were sharpened by even more precise sundials; for example, the analemmatic dial of Sun Stadium. Popularised in France by the seventeenth-century geometer Sieur (Jean-Louis) de Vaulezard, analemmatic sundials work by tabulating the path of the sun from a fixed position at a specific time, each day, over one year.[2] In this new major public dial, the sun’s path was mapped according to the exact latitude and longitude of Magandjin/Meeanjin (Brisbane) from 8 am to 3 pm, hours when light and campus foot traffic was most consistent at the UQ Lakes site. From the curvature of its axial tilt (the path it takes), the sun’s shadow casts itself onto the dial’s elliptical horizontal plate. Over striated hour lines, where time is apportioned and marked, the sun’s shadow loops in the figure of an asymmetrical ‘8’ or lemniscate (‘ribbon’; infinity symbol), which the term ‘analemma’ also refers to.
Whereas sundials historically required fixed gnomons, the analemmatic dial of Sun Stadium takes as its gnomon any active participant who stands at its centre. The participant-gnomon casts their shadow anti-clockwise over the dial’s hour lines, and across a verse taken from a poem written by Jazz Money. Cultural and material information encoded into the boral bedrock cycle through Money’s inscription—bending and dancing and spiralling—in dialogue with an embodied time that is as local (i.e., specific to the site) as it is deep and circular (a solar circuitry some billions of years old). Around a central figure eight fashioned from special ‘eggs,’ a cumulative reading of the cast shadow mimics the analemma of the sun overhead. The participant-gnomon brings the shadow into Hepi’s choreographic fold and across Money’s lyrical utterance to rouse a mythopoesis with which the sun has always ordained–think: sun worship, solar deification, zodiacal placement, etc—and condenses into the simple yet steady shape of a circle. (A shape which bears the symbolic load of ouroboros, cosmic wheels, wombs, birth, the self, wholeness, and perfection.) If configuring its ellipse around an Indigenous symbolic economy for which the circle pictorially relates community, gathering, or campsite, among many others, then the discoidal dial might also be taken as contouring the logistics of an Aboriginal yarning circle, which places all peoples at equidistance within its borders from a shared and reciprocal centre. As in Sun Stadium, within a yarning circle’s dialogic bounds, hierarchical placement and thinking are dissolved to insist on collective kinship, which is not only at the heart of Hepi’s interdisciplinary practice, but is the very means by which First Nations people configure culture, community, and connection.
Coiled in the boundlessness of a circle, Sun Stadium maintains a continuum of solar calendrics that First Peoples have always prefigured around kinship and affinity with the natural world. In so-called Australia, take the egg-shaped stone arrangement of Wurdi Youang (‘big hill’) that organised the Wadawurrung people of present-day Victoria around the sun possibly up to 11,000 years ago. (If this timeframe is correct, the site would predate Stonehenge and even the Great Pyramids of Giza. It would place, as many of us have maintained, Aboriginal peoples at the very frontier of cosmology; we would not merely be this place’s First Peoples, but perhaps the world’s First Astronomers.) Comprising an outcrop of some 100 basalt stones of varying sizes, Wurdi Youang’s major axis is near exactly east–west and seems to suggest the setting position of the sun at the seasonal solstices and equinoxes.[3] Neither the product of accident or chance, this sweeping stone arrangement would have routined a great measure of timeliness, whether of seasonal hunting, flowering, or animal migration, perhaps even ceremony, or other cultural occasions of those who gathered, communed, and camped around its shadow. As but one surviving instance, the secreted away Wurdi Youang tells us that First Nations people sequenced time intentionally and that such intentionality contracted a rather interdependent act beyond survival alone. Not simply an exercise in productivity, to map time was to make socially, culturally, and spiritually cohesive all parts of an interconnected whole. To map solar time was to insist upon a kinship beyond peopled relations as that which encompasses the sun, the stars, earth, water, wind, and animals alike. To keep time was, and is, to keep this kinship: close, together, in, and always as, one. Everyone, everything, everywhere, everywhen.
To return to choreography, Hepi stated that she “didn’t want Sun Stadium to be rooted in a Western way of ‘being’; perform here, and then do this [here].”[4] On choreography, Hepi remarked, “I’ve always referred to its definition as the ‘organisation of space and time’.”[5] Rather than placing her concerns on rote duration or re-enactment, nor on something “didactic”, which choreography typically works according to, Hepi instead sought to emphasise endless continuity between participants in space (here, place) and time. “Who am I working with?” she asked. “How would other people work with it as well? What is the material?”[6] Instead of replicating the workings of Western performance, conclusive acts, things easily resolved and circumscribed by legible starts and finishes, Hepi instead draws upon an Indigenous epistemology of time immemorial: boundless and ancient; prior to memory and beyond the future; able to be grasped but never fully contained. Her organisation of space around this time shirks similar prohibitions to allow for an Indigenous conceptualisation of place that is equally without limits. (Always was and always will be, so the adage goes.) Without emptying Sun Stadium of its proper order of Country–in this case, Yuggera/Turrbal–Hepi brings all other Countries into the work’s solar fold. She intuits that in one Country are all Countries; in one participant, all participants; and that in one measure of shadowed time is all of time itself. Hepi ultimately allows the dial to cater for the collective possibility of multiplicity: many suns, many participant-gnomons, many activations, many times. This sundial is art, science, language, and architecture; a stadium, meeting ground, gathering place, yarning circle, observatory.
Although we only have one sun, and in Sun Stadium, one participant-gnomon who casts their shadow over the dial at a time, Hepi shines a light on the simultaneity of being at play. When a participant stands as gnomon at the centre of the sundial, they stand in the shadow of those who stood before them, and those who will stand after them. Referring to a time immemorial, that shadow holds the memory of every other shadow in every other time and place it has fallen. It brings to the dial an embodied time and place that leaves the residuum of its silhouette for all to pick up and take with them. In this way, Hepi choreographs people, place, Country, culture, time, materiality, and all living things into consanguinity, where their degrees of relation are mapped in the shadow of that ceaseless sun. Not too dissimilarly, when Money’s prose is uttered, as if it were a solar incantation to old gods (or goddesses, as in various First Nations belief systems such as the Yolŋu, Tiwi, or Adnyamathanha), whether aloud or as internal monologue, the speaker’s voice resounds with those who spoke that verse before them, and those who will speak it after them. Speaking has always held a creative power (“In the beginning was the Word”) and in our speaking, we enunciate and echo every possibility of creation. After all, the First Peoples of this place have maintained oral histories that have endured some 65,000 years against all efforts of eradication. Perhaps in this way, Sun Stadium is less about shadow casting as it is shadow speaking: time not only as a shadow of that ceaseless sun, but as its enduring spoken word.
It is curious, then, to consider that the Greek plural ‘analemmata’ once referred to the “foundation or support walls” that flanked the audience seating of Hellenistic auditoriums.[7] Around a shape recognised as symbolising gathering sites, camps, and community, Sun Stadium takes as its very foundation a theatre in which audiences become functional actors and solar orators in life’s most outstanding performance. Hepi decidedly declares that the sun “stands as one of the great choreographers of our lives and ecological systems”.[8] Might it not be the greatest? (Or at least the silent, if not obvious, star of our show?) In its fiery governance, that life-bearing orb crops us into line and anchors us into place with the hulking ‘pull’ of its gravity. Our sun is so encompassing that it comprises 99.85% of all matter in our orbital solar system. Emitting heat and light, it brightens and warms, gives life and maintains it, and in doing so exerts authority over all nature (our atmospherics, plant life, ocean currents, animal migration, human behaviour, and so on). And, yet, more than an officious source of heat and light, its creational furnace fires up the most minute of constituents. In their trillions, solar neutrinos, tiny, subatomic ‘ghost’ particles, spin and oscillate—bending and dancing and spiralling—in all matter, all the time, everywhere, whether living or inert, whether rock or wood or flesh or bone.[9] Not simply giving shadow to our own movement—our easterly rise and westerly set—the sun foments the internal [subatomic] movement of all else. Like the swarming of solar neutrinos, such movement arises according to the conditions of a kinetic and collective kinship that understands everything is connected and dependent on the mutuality of its sum parts. One in all, and all in one.
From one lowly stick we struck a rudimentary rod (or rock) into an elliptical plate (or fielded outcrop) and called it ‘clock’. We contracted its sequential lots into finer and more abstract divisions, and with greater knack divined knowledge of our universe and thus ourselves in its precision. We came to tabulate a solar performance that we could notate in theatrical scores, not just for our own productivity or utility, but for our kin, too, which as mentioned, is all life manifest. We traced in our bodies and with our clocks a dance that has no beginning or end. It is this temporality that Hepi so concretely intervenes upon in her public offering. Giving shape to the sun’s ribboned dance, form to lemniscates and figure eights, Sun Stadium fashions from an analemmatic sundial a theatre of First Time and First Place where the sun rises and sets, loops and spins, speaks and is spoken to. Hepi gives to us a locale where we may gather, slow,, pause, stop, breathe, think, and commune with one another; where time, though it is marked, dissolves into circles and cycles, meeting grounds and gathering sites; and where the shadow of that ceaseless sun is encored over and over and over again forevermore.
- In the Kulin and Gulumoerrgin (Larrakia) cultural calendars, seven seasons are recognised. In the Nyoongar cultural calendar, it is six seasons, which is the same number recognised by the Yolŋu. Many more (or less) seasons are recorded across the country. The Ngan’gi cultural calendar, for example, recognises thirteen seasons whilst in the Walmajarri calendar, only three. Each calendar reflects the natural rhythms and patternation of the place from which they emerge and are contextualised by.
- Bruno Ernst, “Equator Projection Sundials," Journal of the British Astronomical Association 97, no. 1 (December 1986), available https://www.dezonnewijzerkring.nl/downloads/JdR-EquatorProj.pdf.
- Ray P. Norris and Duane W. Hamacher, "The Astronomy of Aboriginal Australia," The Role of Astronomy in Society and Culture Proceedings IAU Symposium no. 260 (2009): 39–45.
- Amrita Hepi in conversation with the author, 10 August 2024.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Architettura di Pietra (Stone Architecture), “The Hellenistic Theatre in Morgantina,” Journal of Architettura di Pietra (October 2008), https://www.architetturadipietra.it/wp/?p=1946.
- Hepi in conversation with the author, 10 August 2024.
- Shannon Brescher Shea, “Catching Ghost Particles,” U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (13 October 2023), https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/catching-ghost-particles.
Adam Ford (Nyoongar) is Associate Curator, First Nations Art, at the National Gallery of Australia.
