Five Sunsets in One Hour (1978)

Ackling's work,Five Sunsets in One Hour (Country Sketch) (1978), is on a sheet of paper-covered card mounted by a smaller coarse brown wood pulp board incised with five parallel lines. He has drawn scorched lines by concentrating the sun’s rays through a hand-held magnifying glass, whilst walking up Chillerton Down, a hill behind his parent’s house on the Isle of Wight, in June 1978. These five stages are ‘sunsets’ because each time the sun sank below his immediate horizon line, he had to climb higher to catch sight of it again. He has marked each ‘sun line’ with the exact time at which it was made (6.50pm, 7.07pm, 7.15pm, 7.36pm and 7.50pm). A printed inscription: ‘Walk up the Hill’ is repeated at five intervals, and above the top scorched line is: ‘Walk down the Hill’. Ackling also records the wind conditions on the day it was made; the degree and angle of the smudging around each line indicates that the wind was stronger at 6.50pm but had weakened and changed direction by 7.15pm. He once said that by harnessing the sun he is channelling energy but also releasing it back into the atmosphere through burning.

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