Marjan van Aubel
Marjan van Aubel’s practice began with a revelation: a coloured, transparent solar cell held in her hands at London’s Royal College of Art, and the sudden certainty that energy could be beautiful. Since graduating in 2012, the Dutch solar designer has followed that certainty across every form—intimate objects, immersive installations, architectural surfaces—always asking not just how we harvest the sun, but how we might fall back in love with it. Her Sunne light, self-powered and soul-affirming, has become an icon of a post-fossil aesthetic: designed to bring the sun indoors, to be lived with rather than installed and forgotten. The Studio's landmark installation The Sun, My Heart filled Somerset House with 77 suspended lamps cycling through the Sun’s daily arc, accompanied by NASA’s own recordings of its vibrations—a meditation on light, time, and the oldest relationship we have. Her works are held permanently in MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the V&A, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
“Since I was young, I have felt the sun as something more than weather. It is the condition of everything—of mood, of colour, of life itself. When I first encountered a solar cell that was also luminous and beautiful, I understood: here was a material that could make the invisible visible, that could let us hold energy the way we hold warmth. I did not want to solve a problem. I wanted to open a feeling.”
“Every ancient civilisation understood the sun as sacred—Ra, Apollo, Inti. We are the first to treat it as infrastructure. My work tries to recover something lost in that reduction: the sense that light is a gift, that the sun’s daily return is still, after all this time, extraordinary. We will not change how we live on this planet through efficiency targets alone. We will change through beauty, through longing, through the desire to live inside something that moves us.”
“Sunne and Ra are invitations—to notice, to slow down, to feel the sun the way our bodies already know how. When someone stands in their light and something shifts in them—a loosening, a sense of arriving—that is what I am making. Not a solution, but a reminder. That the sun has always been enough. That we have always been enough. That returning to it is not regression but grace.”
