Anthea Hamilton:
Cauliflower Sundial

The Aspen Art Museum presents Cauliflower Sundial, a new outdoor sculpture by artist Anthea Hamilton (b. 1978, London). Commissioned for the Museum Commons, the work takes the form of a monumental brassica, crowned with a functional sundial at its apex. Emerging from the intricate, brain-like contours of the vegetable, this ancient chronometric instrument makes the sculpture both poetically evocative and literally calibrated for timekeeping, encapsulating movement and the passage of time–organic, technological, and visual–within a singular form.

Cauliflower Sundial is fabricated from cast aluminum, an industrial material that starkly contrasts with the botanical form of its subject. This juxtaposition of natural imagery and manufactured materiality is a recurring theme in Hamilton’s artistic practice. Renowned for her fluid approach to high and low content, and the seamless interplay between a wide range of fields including sculpture, performance, cinema, and design history, Hamilton here continues her ongoing inquiry into the logics shaping these disciplines.

With its distinctive, luminous patina, Cauliflower Sundial responds to the surrounding environment, catching and refracting sunlight as the day unfolds. While previous projects—such as The Squash (2018), an immersive architectural performance staged in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries—have engaged performers in dialogue with her sculptures, here the choreography is delegated to the natural world: light, shadow, and the Earth’s rotation animate the work in a quietly dramatic rhythm.

Rendered from a 3D scan of an actual cauliflower and enlarged to colossal scale, the vegetable becomes a quotidian readymade imbued with unexpected theatricality. The formal and textural attributes of this perishable food evoke a compelling resemblance to the folds of the human cerebrum, proposing a vivid metaphor for the generation and consumption of thought. Hamilton further accentuates the anthropomorphic qualities of the piece through the inclusion of lips on the octagonal base. At once surreal, sensual, enigmatic, and pop, the work invites a reflection on transformation and the absurd.