TIME CULTIVATED

 

A cauliflower is not an obvious monument. In the hands of British artist Anthea Hamilton, however, the familiar vegetable becomes something altogether more provocative. Commissioned for the Aspen Art Museum’s Museum Commons, Cauliflower Sundial enlarges the brassica to monumental scale, crowning its intricately folded surface with a functioning sundial. Cast in aluminum, the sculpture turns one of nature’s most commonplace forms into an object that is simultaneously botanical, industrial and faintly absurd.

Hamilton began with a 3D scan of an actual cauliflower, preserving its dense, almost cerebral texture before radically changing its scale and material. The resemblance between the vegetable’s clustered contours and the folds of the human brain is intentional, allowing a perishable piece of produce to become a metaphor for the production and consumption of thought. Look more closely and Hamilton adds another human gesture: lips appear on the sculpture’s octagonal base, nudging the work away from straightforward representation and toward the surreal.

The sundial above introduces another layer. Rather than merely representing time, the sculpture actually measures it, its luminous surface catching changing sunlight while shadow moves according to the Earth’s rotation. Hamilton has previously incorporated performers into her installations, most notably in The Squash at Tate Britain in 2018. In Aspen, nature assumes that role. Sunlight, weather and the movement of the day effectively choreograph the work, ensuring that its appearance is never entirely fixed.

That collision of references is characteristic of Hamilton, whose practice moves freely among sculpture, installation, film, performance, fashion and design history. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2016, she became the first Black woman commissioned to create a work for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries the following year. Her work is held in collections including the British Council Collection, the Government Art Collection in London, the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.

At Aspen, though, the biography almost becomes secondary. Cauliflower Sundial succeeds because it makes something utterly ordinary impossible to overlook. Funny at first glance and increasingly complex the longer one considers it, Hamilton’s oversized vegetable turns the passing of an afternoon into part of the artwork itself.

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