Facts are marvels: new suns

“One day I looked at the sun and blinked and saw the residual flashing image familiar to me since childhood. I looked and blinked again. This time I saw different shapes and realised it was because a cloud had just passed over the sun. I died this many times during the summers of 2006 and 2010, during fierce days and cloudy days, drawing and painting my findings in ink. The shapes and their intensity changed, but these were limited in number, at least to me. I’ve counted eight. There may be more, but this is dangerous work and my eyesight is already poor enough. Since way before Carl Jung we’ve known that archetypes fix the human experience of being here in irreducible images. Having realised the fleeting sun flashes I was seeing were part of the lexicography of human experience, I had to see how they fitted. I’m stubborn and don’t accept ideas as presented to me, so I felt compelled to research the symbolic archetypes of the sun. This exhibition shows some of what I saw. I saw no spirals, wheels, fiery crowns or swastikas. Maybe these shapes are elsewhere.”