Zenith by David Ward

Traversing At-Bristol’s Millennium Square is a dramatic integrated light piece by light artist David Ward.

Zenith is inspired by an analemma - the line traced by the sun recorded at noon over the course of a year, as used in the past by navigators, explorers and astronomers.

52 runway-landing lights have been used in this piece, and are programmed to trace a constantly changing orbital path across the square.

On the horizontal plane of Millennium Square, Zenith recreates the shape of an analemma – an elongated ‘figure of eight’.

The top point of the figure of eight marks the highest position of the sun in midsummer and the lowest point midwinter.

The curves and overlaps of the figure result from the changing inclination of the axis of the earth to the sun as the earth orbits the sun.

Visitors to the square will see light moving towards and passing away from them as the 52 lights in the piece (corresponding to the number of weeks of the year) appear to move in waves across the square.

The computer controlled light units provide brilliant and radiant points of light – providing a strong visual presence during daylight hours, as well as at night.

David Ward is particularly interested in working with insubstantial light in contained environments and his work has been commissioned for many different venues, from galleries to swimming pools.

He says of Zenith, “Zenith’s visual formation and its performance as a light work relate to the source image of the analemma on a poetic level, as an analogue rather than a literal, mechanical model, allowing broader associations of astronomy, observation, movement, time and dynamics to come to mind”.