Year Without a Sun

In development
2024-2026

Year Without a Sun is a body of work in development that examines how contemporary climate change has collapsed the distance between human and geological time, and proposes new ways of witnessing environmental change. This project emerges from field research and artwork development undertaken in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in the high Arctic.

Through large-scale experimental photography and sculpture, the project reanimates the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia - one of the most powerful volcanic events in recorded history. The eruption produced climatic disruption across the globe, a period of three years now known as “Years Without a Summer”. It resulted in crop failures, famine, migration and social unrest across Europe, North America and Asia and melting events in the Arctic. It also had a major cultural impact, influencing Mary Shelley’s writing of the first work of modern science fiction, Frankenstein, and key works of the Romanic Sublime by William Turner. Today, this period is studied by climate scientists as a case study on the social, cultural and political effects of sudden temperature shifts.

This project approaches Tambora as an ongoing atmospheric condition that continues to resonate within contemporary experiences of climate instability. By placing a nineteenth-century climate catastrophe in dialogue with present-day environmental change, Year Without a Sun asks how societies perceive and respond to planetary transformations that unfold beyond human scales of vision and time.

In 2025, Kirk undertook a residency at Satellite Institute, in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway. Here she utilised hand-blown glass camera lenses, formed from volcanic sand collected from the slopes of Mount Tambora. The lenses function simultaneously as image-making devices and geological artefacts, embedding the material legacy of the climate change within the process of representation itself. The resulting photographs position the landscape as both subject and medium. In doing so, exploring how environmental events can be made visible through experimental photographic processes, and examining how technologies of observation shape our understanding of a changing planet.

The photographs were created using a Hasselblad 500C film camera which was previously owned by Count Eigil Knuth (1903-1996), a Danish explorer, archaeologist and sculptor. The camera was selected for its historical association with environmental image-making. Modified Hasselblad cameras were used during the Apollo 11, and took the iconic Earthrise photograph, an image widely recognised for shaping the 1960s environmental.

Supported by Christine and Stephen Procter Fellowship, Create NSW and Ian Potter Cultural Trust.

Residency documentation. Photographs courtesy of the artist.