Phillip King

Description

Sun's Roots II is another work of King's that returns to his early work's formal concern with the use of bold colour to define space and the cone as a grounding element. This is not the first work in which King physically connects the sun to the ground. However, its title indicates the importance of this gesture to the artist.

King recently spent a great deal of time in Japan working in a ceramics studio, and Japanese mythology was influential to King's production of this work. In the Shinto religion, Amaterasu is considered to be the sun goddess. In protest at her brother's drunken rampage during which he trampled her rice fields, Amaterasu filled her irrigation ditches and threw excrement at her palaces and shrines, before shutting herself into a cave. This meant that there was no sun and everything in the world began to wither and die, revealing the essential connection between the sun and the earth. A connection formally reproduced by King in Sun's Roots II.

This work also refers to Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan who was considered to be a descendant of Amaterasu, but also the origin of Japan's modern history. The characters that make up Japan's name mean 'sun origin' and the country is often referred to as the 'land of the rising sun.' Sun's Roots II is based upon an investigation into the origins of this country that has recently become influential to King.