the seventeen suns project
Over a period of seventeen years, from 1826 to 1843, on every clear day, the Swiss astronomer Heinrich Schwabe made detailed drawings of the Sun. These accumulated in his notebooks, now held in the Royal Astronomical Society Library in London. Schwabe’s observations of sunspot activity led directly to the discovery of the solar cycle. To celebrate this feat of astronomy and the start of a new cycle, I was invited by Mayes Creative to lead an accumulative social media project called Seventeen Suns, based around the idea of solar observation, as part of their Measuring The Universe creative engagement programme.
Since the start of the project on March 27 2020, I have painted every sunrise with an immediately visible Sun, aspiring to the tenacious spirit of Schwabe’s immense achievement. These have been completed live, mostly from the top window of my home in St Ives, some from other locations.
The individual image titles are prefixed with a hashtag in order to affirm the cumulative nature of the project and collective openness on social media, observers being encouraged to submit their own outcomes. The thinking behind this was to help develop a sense of non-separateness and to provide a creative goal at the onset of the covid-19 epidemic.
warm thanks go to the project funders Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England and Feast Cornwall