My visit to the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in June 2024 was both inspiring and thought-provoking. The Greco-Roman understanding of space is clear from the architecture, the wide public forum, and the layout of each of the villas. The Greeks and the Romans were very aware of their relation to their natural surroundings, which they filled with archetypes, nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, gods and goddesses. These fantastic beings were the connective tissue to their environment. The frescos that decorate their villas illustrate innumerable tales of the relations between the various archetypes and their encounters with human beings. I was also very impressed by the many frescoes that were conceived to create a continual feeling of spaciousness; their walls opened to an imagined outdoors via numerous painted windows, classical entrances, arched or graced with ornamental pillars. I was particularly struck by two images of the head of the Medusa surrounded by serpentine tentacles. I imagined them as solar images, especially the lower image on the right, a fresco of Medusa’s head framed by its circular medallion.
Pompeiians may not have had telescopes powerful enough to study the sun in as much detail as we do, however, during a solar eclipse, they would have had the chance to see the solar prominences and its corona that in the terror of this sudden darkness could be imagined as the Medusa’s head.
For Pompeiians the sun might have seemed a fiery God (Helios, Apollo, Sol Invictus) moving across the sky, sinking every night into the ocean, but it was also the way they calculated the time of day. To relate time to the movement of the sun across the sky is both abstract and very concrete. It is to be daily in relation to the star that gives life to the earth.
The sundial, an ancient time keeping system brought to Greece from India, may have given the Greeks the idea for the shape of the theatre.

Mount Vesuvius and, in general, all volcanoes can bring death and eventually great fertility, bearers both of abundance and disaster. The roots of the word ‘disaster’ come from the belief that the positions of stars influence the fate of humans, often in destructive ways; its original meaning in English was “an unfavourable aspect of a planet or star”. The word comes from the Italian word disastro, from the Latin prefix dis- and Latin astro, meaning ‘star’. In language, possibly the most continuous and unconscious development of thought, we associate Mount Vesuvius and its dis-astros destruction of the city of Pompeii and its surroundings with the sun.
Research is ongoing into the relationship of solar activity with volcanic eruptions. One such study (Duma & Vilardo, 1997) showed that seismic activity in the area of Mount Vesuvius varied in accordance with specific solar cycles, at solar maxima in 1969, 1980, 1989. The results of a recent study reveals that the seismic activity at Mount Vesuvius is still reacting to solar maximum activity (1999 – 2013). There is a strong indication that the frequency of volcanic eruptions occurs in periods of high solar flare activity^[2]. It is clear then that our star, the Sun, communicates with the volcano, Mount Vesuvius.

Solar storm on a dark background. © NASA. Photo: Artisom P.

I have worked with light and, in particular, reflected light for many years. My first encounter with prisms was in 1964, when I was surprised and stunned by a flash of brilliant colour that filled the pupil of my eye as I crossed a busy boulevard in Paris, France.

“It was a very clear day, sunshine splashing colours everywhere but I felt depressed and colourless, as if I were walking through a grey world. Then quite suddenly, I was mesmerised by a pure blue brilliance that made me stop and cry out. As I moved, the light filling my sight became green, then yellow, orange, and red. I felt an instantaneous change of mood. The burden of guilt and repressed anger that I had been carrying evaporated in this gift of light, and I crossed the avenue to see from what or where it had originated. In the window of the second-hand optical store, displayed along with model locomotives and loose camera lenses, were trays of optical glass prisms of varied shapes and sizes. The source of my illumination”. (Liliane Lijn, 1964)

Since that revelatory experience, I have used prisms to refract light, creating large installations with projected rainbows. In the 1970s, I began to attach prisms to stones and rocks found during walks in the mountains and on beaches. I wanted to use prisms with sunlight. However, controlling the direction of light and following the sun was a problem that I was unable to solve on my own.

Liliane Lijn, Firespine, 1976. Courtesy the Artist and Sylvia Kouvali, London/Piraeus

My interest in projecting rainbows was not so much the multi-coloured bands of light reflected on walls and across floors, but more especially the chance flash of brilliant colour directly perceived by the viewer of these works. That flash of pure colour caught by the eye enters the brain directly through the optic nerve, similar to the way a spectroscopic detector samples individual colours of the solar spectrum.

At the exhibition Tibet’s Secret Temple, Wellcome Collection, London (2015-2016) I discovered that Tibetan monks used natural crystals as prisms to refract sunlight directly into the eyes of monks who used this experience to empty and clear the mind. It is the purity and brilliance of directly perceived spectral colours that illuminate the mind.

Lukhang mural, XVII cent. Wellcome Collection, London. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Liliane Lijn

Impression of Solar Hills’ first conception, 2005. Courtesy the Artist. Digital collage: Liliane Lijn

I am interested in the language of light, spectroscopy, the science that allowed us to understand materials, matter and stars. As an artist, I realised that reflected light enabled me to see the surface of the world, but refracted light would allow me to understand the composition of the world I saw around me. Placing an array of prisms, following the curvature of a round stone (Firespine, 1976), was clearly a model for the project which, 25 years later, I named Sunstar.
By combining art, science and technology, Sunstar takes its inspiration from the relationship between the sun, the earth and the communicative role of the spectrum of light.
In 2005, I was awarded an ACE International Artist Fellowship, a residency in partnership with NASA and Leonardo at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley. During my introductory seminar I attracted the attention of the astrophysicist John Vallerga. We had both observed that solar reflections off glass buildings produce surprisingly powerful flashes of light. John thought he could combine my previous work with light with state-of-the-art scientific solar tracking, finding a solution to my desire to control the direction of light.
With John Vallerga’s technical assistance, I initially envisaged a large-scale solar installation in the landscape that would define the horizon with points of light. I called this Solar Hills.^[3]

The aim of this installation was to create an awareness of the Sun as a star, our star, and in so doing, promote a greater awareness of our planet. We hoped that this collaboration between art and science could enable people to reflect on their responsibility for the continuity of life on this planet, an awareness we now recognise as urgent.

We began by testing people’s reactions to seeing a flash of brilliant colour, using a large glass water prism on Hampstead Heath, London (2007). We discovered that people were generally curious and excited on catching sight of the colour. Next, we experimented using plastic prisms, because they were lightweight and inexpensive but, as I had imagined, they proved to be easily scratched and their colours were not as intense as when using glass.

When John and his team built the first Spectra-heliostat using glass prisms, I flew over to San Francisco and we began testing. All our initial tests of this prototype were conducted with the scientist, John, on a hill with the Spectra-heliostat, while I parked my car on the verge of a road at least two or three kilometres away from him. We communicated using our mobile phones. I had to tell John what colours I saw, if any, to help him calibrate the Spectra-heliostat. Since I was standing by the side of the road, I could hear people in passing cars wondering what the bright star was. Some even cried out “Look how red the sun is!” Then a motorcycle pulled up and a man and a woman walked over to where I was standing. She was saying “This must be magic. It’s a bit scary”, while he enquired what it was. I explained and he said he knew it couldn’t be the sun but had wondered whether it was created with mirrors. He turned out to be an astronomer teaching at Berkeley, while she was a student.

Our next test was across the Golden Gate with three astronomers, Patrick, John and Jason on top of Hawk’s Peak, California. After connecting two Spectra-heliostats using cables, they aimed the two rainbows at where I was standing on Crissey Field, a broad avenue by the Golden Gate, which is a very popular promenade for people from San Francisco.

Video documentation of Solar Hills from Crissey Field, 2007. Courtesy the Artist

Liliane Lijn, Solar Hills, 2007. Courtesy the Artist and Sylvia Kouvali London/Piraeus

Generally, light installations take place at night. Sunlight is taken for granted but with this installation we hope to create a new awareness of the beauty and poetry of our star. Observers will intuitively recognise that they are seeing sunlight but will be puzzled by its location and non-random spatial and temporal patterns. We will also be using light to draw people’s attention to the horizon. Dawn and dusk are the mysterious moments that hold people in awe. They are moments in which we become aware of the edge of our planet and its connection and relationship with the cosmos.

Sunstar was installed on the top of George Ellery Hale’s 150-foot tower on Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, Pasadena, California in 2018.

Using time and one of the eight colours as my parameters, I choreographed a changing array of coloured light that was beamed into the Rose Bowl for the 4th of July celebrations in 2020, replacing traditional fireworks. It has since been part of numerous festivals in the Bay area.
The central white area in the beamed light, in all photographs of Sunstar, is due to a dynamic range problem⁴ that is intrinsic to camera sensors. This is not what the human eye will see, which will be a uniformly intense colour as bright as the sun but infinitely smaller, the size depending on distance of the observer from the Spectra-heliostat. Our findings after consultation with optical specialists is that a safe distance is at least 500 metres from our six prism Spectra-heliostat. The distance from the Vesuvius crater and the Archeological Park of Pompeii is roughly 9000 metres.