Tai Shani
Haunted by a Million Small Suns (Cardinal), 2025
- Medium
- Jesmonite, glass and electrics
- Dimensions
- 60 x 53 x 16 cm
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0064
About the work
A curved red form supports a pale, flame-like glass element lit from below. Organic shape and electric light meet in a sculpture that feels both bodily and otherworldly. Haunted by a Million Small Suns (Cardinal) belongs to Tai Shani’s wider creation of imagined environments, where objects, voices and stories give form to alternative possibilities of life. Made in 2025, the work holds that expansive imaginative world within a single luminous presence.
About the artist
Tai Shani is a British artist born in London in 1976 whose practice combines sculpture, installation, performance, film, sound and writing. Feminist thought, mythology and speculative storytelling provide starting points for environments that imagine different forms of social and emotional life.
Her long-running Dark Continent project developed a cast of interconnected characters through an expanded response to Christine de Pizan’s fifteenth-century Book of the City of Ladies. DC: Semiramis brought together twelve of those characters in a sculptural setting activated by performance. Jointly commissioned by Glasgow International, The Tetley and Nottingham Contemporary, it was also presented at Turner Contemporary in 2019.
Objects, voices and narratives operate together in Shani’s practice, allowing sculpture to function within a larger imagined world. Projects including The Neon Hieroglyph and The Spell or The Dream continue this movement across media. The latter was presented at Somerset House in 2025 before travelling to Jupiter Artland.