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As Sunshine Turns To Stone


As Sunshine Turns To Stone, installation view, 2024

As Sunshine Turns To Stone, scan view, 2024

As Sunshine Turns To Stone, scan view, 2024

As Sunshine Turns To Stone, scan view, 2024




As Sunshine Turns To Stone

Details & MaterialAbout

2024
Anthracite and stone coal lumps
Burnt engraving of carboniferous coal forests
Stainless steel support stand
Headlamp
45cm x 45cm x 145cm


As Sunshine Turns to Stone positions engraved anthracite coal lumps from North Rhine-Westphalia, the Svalbard archipelago, western China, and the western United States under the glow of a coal miner’s headlamp, each elevated on a stainless steel support stand.

The stone’s alluring quality draws the view to its glistening flat surface, revealing a primordial, petrified landscape from the Carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago, burned into its skin. Offering both a reverie of primordial origins and a shimmering, hopeful fantasy of progress yet to unfold, proposing a new age of exploration into the geological and metaphysical realities of primordial landscapes, which remain vital to contemporary energy production. The connection serves as a reminder of the living, forested origins of today’s fossil reserves, based on plants’ ability to capture and transform sunlight through photosynthesis and to fossilize light and atmospheric conditions in the form of coal.