Artwork: Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-6, Great Basin Desert, Utah
I recently published an art story for Nancy Holt’s installation Starfire, which was originally created in 1986 and recreated for the exhibition Ecstatic Land at Ballroom Marfa in Texas this year. I was initially drawn to Holt’s permanent land art installation constructed between 1973-6 in the Great Basin Desert in northern Utah, where she bought forty acres of land to create Sun Tunnels.
Holt said this about the land and how it inspired her:
“In the surrounding area are old trails, crystal caves, disused turquoise, copper, and tungsten mines, old oil wells and windmills, hidden springs, and ancient caves. A nearby cave, coated with centuries of charcoal and grease, is filled with at least ten feet of residue—mostly dirt, bones, and artefacts. Out there a “lifetime” seems very minute. After camping alone in the desert awhile, I had a strong sense that I was linked through thousands of years of human time with the people who had lived in the caves around there for so long. I was sharing the same landscape with them. From the site, they would have seen the sun rising and setting over the same mountains and ridges.”
Sun Tunnels is currently owned and under the stewardship of DIA Art Foundation, who oversee Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Holt consulted with numerous people such as astrophysicists, engineers, astronomers, surveyors, road graders, carpenters, construction workers, and photographers to create the large cement tunnels that are positioned in alignment with the rising and setting sun on the days of the solstices around June 21st and December 21st. On these days the sun is centred through these tunnels, and nearly centre for about ten days either side of the solstice.
Artwork: Nancy Holt Sun Tunnels, 1973-6, Great Basin Desert, Utah
The four tunnels are positioned in an X configuration eighty-six feet long on the diagonal, and each tunnel is eighteen feet in length. If you go inside the tunnels, there are holes cut out in the upper half of the tunnels, each pattern of holes is different to align with the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn.
Holt speaks eloquently of how the concept of time is intrinsic to the installation:
“’Time’ is not just a mental concept or a mathematical abstraction in the desert. The rocks in the distance are ageless; they have been deposited in layers over hundreds of thousands of year. “Time” takes on a physical presence. Only ten miles south of Sun Tunnels are the Bonneville Salt Flats, one of the few areas in the world where you can actually see the curvature of the earth. Being part of that kind of landscape, and walking on earth that has surely never been walked on before, evokes a sense of being on this planet, rotating in space, in universal time.”
Like with Starfire, the Sun Tunnels installation connects the artwork with the cosmos, the stars, the seasons and brings awareness of this to the viewer, bringing the vastness of space back to the human scale, to bring the heavens that much closer to earth.
[source quotes: https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/sun-tunnels-0]