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Just over two hours after sharing this post, Earth will pass through its aphelion — the farthest distance it will be from the sun over the next 365 days. At 6:27pm ET on July 5, 002021 Earth, will be 94,510,886 miles (152,100,527 km) from its star. That’s 3 million miles farther than it will be six months from today.
Continuing our Sunworker project, we used today’s cosmological “holiday” to experiment with visualizing the continuous force of the sun upon on Earth, our bodies, and all things as it shapes life, weather and geology in myriad ways.
Despite our greater distance from the Sun at aphelion, we are nearing the height of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and are experiencing some of the strongest UV rays of the year.* To visualize the intensity of the sun’s rays on this particular day, we created a home-made “UV strip” from turmeric ink and wore it directly on our clothes when we were outside. When we were indoors, we placed the strip on our Brooklyn balcony to catch photons as they arrived continuously.
Roughly each hour, we exposed an additional inch of the strip (to direct and/or ambient sunlight) resulting in a creative imaging of eight hours of the sun’s light as it accumulated on Earth between 7am-3pm on aphelion 002021.
The resulting anthotype is our first experiment in creating a wearable artwork that visually expresses one of the sun’s forces through color gradation. It is an imprint of the sun’s intensity on this day during the hours leading up to the moment when Earth reaches the farthest limit of our annual orbit.
Aphelion Anthotype, smudge studio 002021 (eight hours of the sun’s light as it accumulated on Earth between 7am-3pm on aphelion, July 5, 002021).
*On January 30th, 002020, we held a project to mark the coldest day of the year in New York City. The City’s thermal (temperature) maximum arrives on July 20th and is not related to aphelion.
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