Andrew McNiven: Calton Hill Solar
Calton Hill Solar (2025, 17’ 59”, HD digital video, digital stereo audio), was conceived initially as a site-specific work, made in a studio in Edinburgh in close proximity to the studio of photographic pioneers David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848) during the 1840s. Their calotype process required both long exposures and high levels of light, the only source of which at that time was sunlight and the effect and evidence of sunlight can be seen in many of their images.
Calton Sun Solar ‘borrows’ the same sunlight as Hill and Adamson, a simple acknowledgement of or parallel to their practices and presence in the city. However, there are wider and further implications to any image of the sun, described by Francis Ponge in ‘The Sun Placed in the Abyss’ as “the formal and indispensable condition of everything in the world… The condition of sight itself.” There is an inescapable paradox of representing something which it is impossible to gaze at directly, (as in Michel Foucault’s unrepresentable ‘blind spot’), and which we can only really comprehend through its effects and influence. To use the camera to gaze directly at the sun and to record and represent this is, in effect, to create an ‘impossible’ image.
Calton Hill Solar was made with the support of the Outer Spaces’ Cube Studio Programme,
part of the 2025 Edinburgh Art Festival.