Skirting Board Sunset

This was just a very quick experiment I did with a mini projector as we had one around the house. I intended to project the image on a window with darkness outside but quickly realised that that wouldn't work because of the reflection of the projector light (some things are so obvious with hindsight). I was looking around the house trying to think of poetic places to position the projected image of the contact lens, perhaps somewhere which would hint at it being the sun or moon or a planet. I've used or looked at the living room floor in several projects (first year sellotape sculpture, second year written piece) so probably felt a draw towards it - the wall above is also the only bit of blank wall in there to project onto. I started playing around with the angle of the projector and pretending the sun-like shape was setting. I really like how the image stretches when it reaches the floor, as well as the colours on the different surfaces. 

The main thing I took from this was the juxtaposition of the monumental and the mundane... the sentence 'A small sun sets on a skirting board horizon', which I captioned the work on Instagram, involves the enormous, incomprehensible notion of the sun with a really banal/familiar, domestic feature. There is a really curious mix of scales and relationships within this. The connection between the sun and light, with the contact lens and its function as a vision machine is also compelling; when the sun goes down there is less light / without the contact lens there is less sight.

I wanted the sun to rise again in the gif, maybe to create a sense of hope, but moreso because then it would loop back to the beginning. This repetition is a very poetic feature of the gif, and I am interested in using them for that purpose - to convey my sense that growth and decay, and life and death are cyclical.

I've just realised how funny it is that I'm looking at sunsets because, although a bit of a cliche image, I always think of sunsets when I think about how I try to make people notice everyday things, I have a very clear memory of being in the car with some friends when we were about 13. there was an incredible sunset as we left school, the sky was so colourful with pink and orange and yellow and I found it so incredibly awe inspiring; none of my friends cared however, they saw it too but they didn't see in it what I saw or felt in it what I felt. Sunsets or bright moons or blue skies always place me, they make me think about my position in the Universe, and therefore all the deeper mysteries that go along with that. I wondered, and to this day still wonder, what it takes for those friends to feel that same intensity, to match my silent euphoria - what in life makes them feel how I do when I see an incredible sky? I think about this often because it reminds me that everyone thinks in different ways and has sensitivities to different things.