About Sun Tunnels
Far out in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, four enormous concrete cylinders lie in an X-shaped arrangement with no building, town, or conventional monument around them. Artist Nancy Holt created Sun Tunnels between 1973 and 1976 as a work that uses the desert, the sky, and the movement of the sun as part of its structure.
Each tunnel is about eighteen feet long and nine feet in diameter. The four cylinders are aligned so they frame sunrise and sunset around the summer and winter solstices. Smaller holes drilled through the concrete correspond to the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn, allowing spots of sunlight to move across the tunnel interiors like stars.
The installation works on an enormous scale while remaining simple enough to explain with four pipes in the dirt. What changes is everything around them. Light shifts through the openings. The horizon moves through the circular frames as visitors walk. Shadows become part of the sculpture. At the solstices, the relationship between the tunnels and the sun becomes particularly obvious.
Sun Tunnels is remote and reached by unpaved desert roads. There are no nearby visitor services, fuel stations, or convenient urban landmarks. That isolation is not an inconvenience added to the artwork. It is part of the artwork.