Guided by principles of intuition, Sonne (German for ‘Sun’), was titled after Schwartze Sonne (‘Black Sun’, smoke and charcoal on canvas by Otto Piene, 1963), drawing a relationship with this historic cultural moment. Rather than a black sun, Sonne, a ring, is an empty space surrounded by a polished golden interior. As the viewer looks through the sculpture, the periphery of perception is subtly shifted by golden light. The work explores an art experience of subtle transformation of emotional atmosphere, referencing embodied qualities of grief mixed with beauty, and a mode of atmospheric perception such as in ambient music. The sculpture was also informed by a dialogue with the material that it was originally made from, beeswax, which was donated by a local community apiary. Emerging through an intuitive process of blind sculpting accompanied by the scent of beeswax, the form is infused with an embodied relationship to the bees and local natural environment. The memory of the beeswax in Sonne prompted use of beeswax within the exhibition space in later works.
