the june fox: Ever Rotating Sky: project overview

Day 1 - detail of timelapse video
cardboard, pinholes, sunlight, paper screen
©2007 Kirsten Bradley

Ever Rotating Sky is the first suite in a series of works which attempt to grapple a tiny bit with perceptions of the ‘natural world’, landscape and ‘the grand view’ within our culture. What do we perceive as natural? How is that changing? In a world out of balance, it is perhaps within the membranes between the organic and the simulated forms of ‘nature’ that answers to important questions lie.

The Ever Rotating Sky series was created while on residency at the Banff Centre, Canada, in 2007. The series exists as a number of single-channel videos, and a series of small prints.

With this work I wanted to find a way to chart the passing of a day, whilst layering into such a record other charts, other natural systems. I did this by setting up a camera obscura in my studio, but rather than having one, single pinhole to reveal the world outside, I had many. I based my pattern of pinholes on a starchart of the night sky for Banff in summer, and so my studio window became a planetarium of sorts. The outside world was revealed through an array of tiny upside-down pictures of the Mountains and valley outside my studio.

As individual camera obscuras, each image charted the passing of a day outside. As a collective mass of blending worlds of Mountains and sky, my studio window charted both time and space. Time in the form of the circadian rhythm of the solar day, and space in the form of a starmap of the sky above, represented by tiny pictures. Over the course of a day, the light from this mass of constellations ebbed and waned - the sun and clouds outside became tiny stars surrounded by nebula, and rain on the window refracted the pinhole pictures to a blur, only to snap back into focus as the sun came out, and dried the raindrops.

A camera within my studio recorded the effect of this camera obscura continuously over the course of each day, at a rate of one picture every 20 seconds. These individual pictures were then collated into timelapses. The resulting series of Ever Rotating Sky is four video works, one for each full day (dawn until dusk) recorded using this method.

Outcomes for Ever Rotating Sky include:

Exhibition
Trio - Other Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada June 2007

Exhibition
Studied Natures - Westspace, Melbourne, August 2007

- process diary for Ever Rotating Sky (Banff residency)
- photos for Ever Rotating Sky

- video excerpt: Forgetting you is like breathing water (day 4) - 2'09