Twice a year the seasonal movement of the sun's path, as seen from earth, appears to pause at the northern or southern limit before reversing in direction.
The sun's motion in declination comes to a stop at the moment of solstice and appears to stand still before it's culmination and turning-point.
This pause in time is explored in Sun Standing Still.
The importance of stopping and noticing ourselves, our environment and our place in this world has probably never been more important in today's society.
To pause
It can be all too easy to lose touch with the way we feel and how our immediate environment. Nature and the everyday world can become unseen, unheard.
Spellbound by our phones, isolated by our noise cancelling headphones, or cocooned for hours with 'bingeworthy' content" in our homes and all the while
the world keeps spinning and the days and the nights merge into a seamless pattern of wake, work, eat, sleep, wake...
Our thoughts are dulled and our behaviours become an homogenised routine. Gradually, almost without realising, our emotions and our relationships can
begin to suffer.
Sun Standing Still is a series of pauses, incorporating the spiritual beliefs of both the summer and winter solstices of abundance, gestation, birth, death and
rebirth. It portray’s the cyclical patterns of nature, the beauty, the pain and the evidence of it being our playground, our battleground and our responsibility.
Working with refugees and Asylum seekers in Middlesbrough and Stockton upon Tees, Someplace Other explores their relationship with the area and the places that
hold a resonance for them.
These places portray metaphors of strength, struggle, faith and resilience, reflecting the life they knew and the life they now live; in a region that still struggles with
its own identity and continuing social and economic problems.