Planet Earth Gallery: collaborative sound, architecture, and solar spectrum light installation.
Installed in the year 2000, this climate awarness exhibition was sponsored by the United Kingdom's Millennium Fund. The nature based, ever-changing art is made from Sunlight, prisms and the architectural space of the Earth Centre. Visitors step inside living solar rainbows to discover the “beauty and dangers of sunlight”.
Heliostat, solar powered solar spectrum installation
George Tsypin – architect/stage designer Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger – sound and conceptual design Peter Erskine – solar spectrum installation
Paul B. MacCreadyEngineer and Inventor of human-powered flight, Chairman of the Board, AeroVironment Inc.
Secrets of the Sun can broaden people¹s thinking, get them fascinated by the connections between different topics — and even enthusiastic enough to talk and argue about these things. It combines technology, the human senses, beauty, art and sound. It¹s part of what it takes to get the most important force in the world today — the human mind—a little closer to wisdom rather than intelligence.
Edmund PillsburyMuseum Director, Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
It is impressive enough that Peter Erskine has created something of such ingenuity and simplicity yet almost infinite complexity. It is even more astonishing that the ensemble has such extraordinary artistic integrity and conviction while at the same time addressing critical environmental and social issues with which our society is only beginning to grapple and which pose one of the greatest challenges to the survival of our society in the next millennium.
Thomas E. LovejoySmithsonian Institution
Someone like Peter Erskine (who combines a sense of art with an understanding of how the world works) must have been responsible for Stonehenge.
Schmidti18, Youth Gang Member, Berlin, Germany
S.O.S. changed my life and my whole attitude. It changed my behavior directly. Now I appreciate nature, my health, my friends, my life. S.O.S. showed me that we live in a fragile and impermanent time. My family and friends talk about it. We cannot perform as before — being destructive just for fun or because we feel desperate and frustrated. Now we help each other to accomplish awareness. Now I have to do something positive. Now.
Professor John R. ClarkeRegents Professor of Art History, University of Texas, Austin, Texas
Erskine has developed a project that is more holistic than any site-specific installation… more thought-provoking than any conceptual piece… and visually more enthralling than any painting, sculpture, or light-installation work in the past two decades.