Janet Saad-Cook
An artist who narrates the movement of colours through the Sun Drawing
Janet Saad-Cook’s art lies at the intersection of light and, space and time. Honoured as a pioneer in the field of multidisciplinary art, she invented new ways to create art by fusing sunlight, time, reflection and motion. Working with pure wavelengths of light coming from the sun, Saad-Cook combines ancient sun-marking techniques with 21st-century technology to create Sun Drawings and solar sculptures that attune viewers to the cosmos, revealing glimpses of the grand order of the Universe and creating a link with all humanity.
Saad-Cook continually explores connections between light and time, which she first became aware of in the early 1980s while working independently at prehistoric sun-marking sites. Her studies of the sites revealed the earliest techniques humans used to live in harmony with the natural world. She believes that using these ancient ways of sky-watching in combination with modern technologies evokes powerful symbols that acknowledge our place in the Universe while connecting us to the continuum of time.
Her art is characterised by decades of collaboration with scientists, engineers, and architects and independent research in archaeoastronomy. She has presented papers about her work at scientific institutions such as MIT, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the International Astronomical Union (IAU), among others, and lectures extensively in the US and abroad. Her art is in permanent collections of major public institutions and private collections.
Sun Drawing
Working with sunlight and time combined with metals and optically coated glass, the Artist creates reflected images of light that move and change in harmony with the sun’s cycle. Continuously changing images appear as sunlight touches the carefully shaped metals and glass.
To experience Sun Drawings is to see brilliant images of light soar across walls, evolving and dissolving as the sun makes its daily sweep of the Earth. The changing pictures evoke a calming connection to the natural world, the Earth’s and sky’s silent rhythms, marking hours, days and seasons. Each Sun Drawing works with the path of sunlight relative to the point on Earth where it resides, orienting viewers in time and space.
