Four Suns

Comar

An Tobar

Tobermory

Mull

www.comar.co.uk

November 5 to December 31

In a country obsessed by the whereabouts of the sun at any given moment, what better thing when the nights are drawing in, says Curator Sion Parkinson of Mull’s Comar arts organization, than an exhibition that looks at our response to daylight.

Four Suns takes as its starting point the recent discovery by amateur astronomers of Kepler 64b, the first documented case of a planet in a four star system – essentially a planet which orbits two stars which are, in turn, orbited by two other stars. The idea of a world being constantly illuminated piqued the interest of Parkinson, who has brought together four artists – Roger Ackling, Amanda Thomson, Chris Welsby and Annie Catrell – to refract the theme.

“The work taps in to those historic futile attempts to bottle the sky, to compress time or capture weather,” says Parkinson. “But these works are very different. It’s the pensive quality that I really like.”

Amanda Thomson’s work is most closely allied to Mull. The artist sent steel etching plates to Parkinson every month for a year which were placed around Mull, pointing skywards. Over the following month, the weather ‘etched’ the plates, the resultant circular images like a flurry of sunspots, a snapshot of the ephemeral.

Capturing the invisible, too, is Annie Catrell’s Conditions, a series of glass blocks laser-etched on the inside with a year’s worth of cloudscapes; Roger Ackling’s Voewood sculptures (2006 and 2007) charting the passage of the sun burnt onto wood with a hand-held magnifying glass; and film-maker Chris Welsby’s Seven Days, made some 40 years ago on a mountainside in Wales. “Their artistic practices are disparate, but these moments chime and resonate,” says Parkinson. “I think that these works will read very clearly next to one another.”

Sarah Urwin Jones