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.