pocket sundial

Johann Georg Kleininger, artist

1763–1824

pocket sundial, circa 1790

Where object was made: Germany

Material/technique: wood

Credit line: The Doctor Maurice L. Jones Collection

Accession number: 1952.0063

Not on display

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Label texts

Collection Cards: STEM

A sundial uses the movement of the sun to measure the hours of a day. A pocket sundial like this one folds up and is easy to carry with you. This sundial also includes a compass so that it can be accurately pointed north. The compass uses a magnetic needle that aligns to Earth’s magnetic field at the northern axis of the planet. Once the sundial is aligned to the north, the sunlight creates a shadow from the string. This shadow falls on the hour of the day.

Describe the sun’s position in the sky in the morning, at lunchtime, and late afternoon in relation to your school building.

How do you tell time? Do you look at the sky, wear a watch, or something else? Could you tell time at night with a sundial, or not?

Teaching Gallery: Case study in contemporary installation art: Ann Hamilton + Cynthia Schira’s Commission for the Spencer Museum of Art An Errant Line

Similar to how Ann Hamilton and Cynthia Schira required time and fabric to materialize An Errant Line, this pocket sundial required fabric (in the form of string) to tell time. With it, as with the works by Hamilton and Schira, cloth and time interact in space.

This 18th-century sundial used technology made obsolete by the increasingly common pocket watch, but it offered what later clocks did not: a sense of where you are. The user of this early timepiece would have opened the small wooden case to reveal the dial and compass, then aligned the ‘style’ (a fabric string that held each side together) exactly with the Earth’s axis to determine the time. Unlike clocks that allowed passive interiority, this sundial required an outdoor location and a tactile sense of positioning.

The sundial’s requisite manipulations made time tangible, and its reliance on the environment heightened users’ awareness of their location and enveloping surroundings. In this object and the two artists’ installation, fabric and time allowed for an engagement with place.

Joel Coon, History of Art undergraduate major

Exhibition Label:
"Time/Frame," Jun-2008, Robert Fucci, Shuyun Ho, Lauren Kernes, Lara Kuykendall, Ellen C. Raimond, and Stephanie Teasley
The sundial is one of the oldest known tools for keeping time. Because sundials use the movement of the sun to measure the hours of the day, the accuracy of a sundial depends on the exact alignment of an object called a style-in this example the string-to the earth’s axis. This tablet sundial includes a small compass for the user to position the dial towards true north and determine the correct time. When open, the hinged faces create the sundial; when closed, they fold into a portable box.