From the moment I was shown the studio where I was to live and work for my year's residency in Berlin, I was captivated by the enormous windows, their view of Berlin, and the sunlight they introduced, flooding across my floors. Seeing this as a rare opportunity to transform my own living space into an artwork, I began by tracing, documenting, the plays of light from the beginning to the end of each day. I continued this drawing practice every month throughout the year, in a dialog with each hour, each seasonal change of light.
During my open studio sessions, I worked to bring this practice into form. Instead of exhibiting the original drawings, I transferred the shadows of one window frame onto the floor, capturing the movement of its light throughout a day. I then created a shadow-shaped object halfway between the window and the floor, visualizing the invisible layer of light that also falls between the window and the alcove. I wondered if materializing this invisible part could draw attention to the shape of light and segment it. I also created an object using circles and mirrors on the wall opposite this window depiction, and exhibited a piece of paper bearing a passage from the Japanese Wikipedia about the life cycle of the sun written in mirror writing:
"Following the red giant stage, the Sun will evolve into a pulsating variable star, and shed its outer layers to become a dense type of planetary nebula, releasing gas over a period of 100,000–500,000 years. It will then evolve into a white dwarf, ceasing to produce energy by fusion, and slowly cool over billions, possibly trillions, of years. This evolutionary model is typical of the life cycle of low-mass stars, making the Sun a very common star."
Even the movement of the Sun over a single day moved me, and made me want to capture it in a tangible form. However, even the Sun, with its billions years of life, is merely another ordinary star in the Milky Way. I wondered if I could demonstrate this gap between ordinariness and exclusivity here. I read the letters of an image through a mirror. I contrasted the process of materializing the window with the process of visualizing the words. On the morning of the open studio, I found a dead moth next to the work and gently transferred it onto a piece of paper.