“Copernicus found that the orbits of the planets would look simpler if they were looked at from the sun and not from the earth… His first step was a leap of imagination – to lift himself from the earth, and put himself wildly, speculatively into the sun.”

- Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

In the late 1970’s, when I was a teenager, my father gave me Bronowski’s book, Science and Human Values. It awakened my understanding that art and science both fundamentally rely on the imagination. That same year, my father was creating an apparatus to collect and transform sunlight into affordable energy for the home. Shortly after his solar project launched, he died unexpectedly, at the age of 49. My personal grief aligns with collective grief in the forty years since, as the unrelenting consumption of fossil fuels continues to cause climate precarity, crisis, and degradation to life-supporting ecosystems.

Sparked by the weight of lost opportunities, the series, Speculatively Into the Sun is an exploration of energies; sunlight, oil, loss, grieving, and the possibility of renewal. This work comes out of an improvisational process of form-finding — to feel the weightlessness of light traveling from sun to Earth, to perceive the viscous density of oil, and to sense the tension between presence and absence.