Spar, 2026 in Chasing the Sun Stone | Shelley Simpson & Gregory Thomas
18 September - 2 October, 2026
In Iceland, the mineral calcium carbonate occurs as the very hard crystal, Iceland Spar. From the 17th century until the second half of the 20th century this crystal was mined at the Helgustaðir mine in East Iceland, now a protected site. Iceland Spar has the remarkable ability to split light into a double refraction. This led to polarised light microscopy, which allowed the study of the properties of materials. Iceland Spar may also be the Viking sólarsteinn, or Sun Stone, which allowed navigators to find the sun on cloudy days by creating a visual effect in the eye called Haidingers Brush.
While it was mined, Iceland Spar travelled far and wide. The largest known piece of the crystal is held at the Natural History Museum in London, which I visited on my way to Iceland. Interestingly, the display that holds the huge piece of Iceland Spar also holds a beautiful pounamu hei tiki. As manuhiri from Aotearoa seeking Iceland Spar, I felt that I became the third point in a resonant triangle of meaning between myself and these two mineral entities.
While in Iceland I found myself thinking about the question, As manuhiri, what might it mean to be hosted by a mineral in its geologic home? I spent time at the historic mine site, and used the crystals I found lying on the ground to make cyanotypes and lumens in the spring sun. The mine was peaceful, the crystals glittered, scattered across the hillside. The history of extraction felt very close, hovering just out of sight. How might I relate differently to the stony entities that seem to have burst out of the ground?
The way that Iceland Spar splits light invited me to consider the fractured nature of my relationship as a Paakehaa to minerals and to colonial extractive activity, a persistent thread throughout my research and art making. By creating images of the sun through a piece of Spar, I worked towards a collaborative gesture, in which the resulting image was created as much by the crystal as it is by the sun, the photography chemistry, and my own actions. In these images, my intention was to capture the double refraction effect. In this I was mostly unsuccessful.
The moving image work Sólarsteinn: searching for the Sun Stone, began as a series of pinhole photographs made by using a thin sliver of Iceland Spar as the camera lens. I made a pinhole camera from a beer can, exposing photographic paper to the late Icelandic spring sun for a split second. These images are layered and in motion, with audio created in collaboration with musician Joost Langeveld. Together, the moving image and the audio become a lullaby, sometimes soothing, sometimes fractious, in a troubled expression of mineral relations.