I utterly and completely failed to take a picture during the eclipse— it honestly didn’t occur to me. I just laid there and looked and was baffled and charmed and excited. It literally gave me chills.

I was lucky enough to be asked to make a piece for the Atlas Obscura/ Valley of the Vapors Ecliptic festival. The piece was a fun challenge, and I find that I both want to make more pieces with doors and that I also fear hanging cabinet doors might have to be left to the professionals. In thinking over ideas for the piece, I looked over many images of total eclipses, from contemporary to antique. Many of these were fascinating. I loved the various methods used in antique images to communicate the corona of the sun around the moon. And the way photographs capture the diamond ring effect.

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, chromolithograph of total eclipse, 1881–1882

So, as a twenty-first century person witnessing the eclipse, I had a large number of pre-eclipse images to assemble into my expectations for the event. What I hadn’t anticipated was the ways the event was so much more than just the image of the moon blocking the sun (although that was incredible to see). The way the light itself changed as it fell on us— an erie, white light that seemed all wrong for the middle of the day. All wrong for sunlight in general. The quite of the birds and insects. Because it was a spring day, the air became much cooler without the heat of the sun, even for just those few minutes. All around us, a 360 degree sunset occurred below what appeared to be a new, black sun. It was entirely magical.

In the end, I didn’t manage to find an way to depict the eclipse itself that called to me. Instead, all I could conjure up was that this was an event of covering and uncovering, and that, to me, meant doors. Not just doors but also an earth, and perhaps some other planets, seen as if from the moon, the main doorway that was opening and closing. I used a pano photo I had taken at the Kings River overlook altered in Photoshop to create my earth-in-resin. And paid a bit of homage to Joseph Cornell with the hanging of wooden balls and other found pieces inside the cabinet. I will also admit to having been inspired by William Blake’s illustration The Ancient of Days when installing the calipers to measure the world.

In retrospect, I’m fortunate that I didn’t attempt to paint an eclipse. Somehow, I’m not sure I could have done it justice.

Total Eclipse