Luke Jerram’s Helios Turns the Sun into an Immersive Installation

Helios at Cork Midsummer Festival, Ireland. Photo ©Jed Niezgoda

Luke Jerram, the British artist internationally known for his large-scale public installations exploring scientific and planetary themes, presents Helios, a new touring artwork that transforms the Sun into an immersive visual and sonic experience.

Active since 1997 across sculpture, installations and live arts projects, Jerram has developed a practice that connects art, public engagement and scientific storytelling, as seen in works such as Museum of the Moon, Gaia and Mars. With Helios, the artist continues this trajectory by offering audiences the rare opportunity to encounter the surface of our nearest star from close range and in complete safety.

Helios at St Albans Museum + Gallery, UK. Photo ©Stephanie Belton

The artwork takes the form of a large internally lit sphere measuring seven metres in diameter, created from highly detailed imagery of the Sun’s surface. The sculpture reproduces the Sun at an approximate scale of 1:200 million: each centimetre corresponds to around 2,000 kilometres of the solar surface.
Detail Photo, ©Luke Jerram

In this way, Helios reveals details that most people would never normally see, including sunspots, spicules and filaments, allowing for an intimate encounter with a celestial body that is otherwise impossible—and dangerous—to observe directly.

A Sun shaped by science and perception
To create an accurate representation of the Sun, Helios draws on photographs by astrophotographer Dr Stuart Green, taken between May 2018 and June 2024, alongside NASA observations, with scientific guidance from solar scientist Professor Lucie Green of University College London. Yet the artwork’s scientific precision is paired with a strong experiential dimension: visitors are not simply invited to look, but to physically and emotionally engage with a presence that is usually distant, blinding and inaccessible.
Helios at Jubilee Pool, Bristol, UK. Photo ©Tom Greetham
The sculpture even includes the source of the solar flares that caused the Northern Lights to be visible from the UK in May 2024. This detail strengthens the connection between the installation and real astronomical events, turning the work into a threshold between artistic representation and cosmic observation.

An artwork in dialogue with architecture
As with many of Jerram’s works, Helios does not exist in isolation, but takes shape through its relationship with the space that hosts it. The installation is designed to be presented in museums, cathedrals, science centres, parks and urban public spaces, and each setting changes the way it is perceived, depending on the architecture, the season, the light and the community moving through it. The project is therefore not just a suspended sculpture, but a device that temporarily reshapes the experience of space itself.
Helios at Liverpool Cathedral, UK. ©Stephen Ellis Bell Photography

This visual dimension is accompanied by an original surround sound composition by Duncan Speakman and Sarah Anderson, bringing together sounds of fire and heat, NASA recordings from solar missions, dawn chorus, summer landscapes and references to religious festivals associated with light. The soundtrack fills the space, creates atmosphere and guides interpretation, intensifying the relationship between the sphere and the surrounding architecture.

The Sun as a shared cultural image
Helios is not only about science. The artwork also invites reflection on the role of the Sun throughout human history: as a source of light, warmth and energy, as the basis of life on Earth, and as a symbolic presence woven into religions, calendars, festivals and systems of timekeeping. Its title refers to Helios, the Sun god in Greek mythology, a figure embodying the daily passage of the sun across the sky and the rhythm of the seasons.

Helios at Dyffryn Gardens, UK. ©National Trust Images, Aled Llywelyn
This overlap of astronomical fact, myth and collective imagination reveals one of the defining features of Jerram’s practice: his ability to make complex ideas visible through accessible and shared forms. Over the years, his work has been marked by a strong engagement with planetary health, scientific communication and public participation. In 2019, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, further confirming the close relationship between his artistic research and astronomy.

A temporary platform for events and communities

Helios is also conceived as an open platform for locally developed public programmes. Each host venue can activate the installation through concerts, choral performances, science talks, discussions on environment and wellbeing, yoga, poetry readings, dance and theatre. In this sense, the artwork functions as a temporary cultural infrastructure capable of bringing together communities, knowledge and shared practices.

With Helios, Luke Jerram continues to transform celestial bodies into devices of proximity and wonder. More than a representation of the Sun, the installation constructs a close encounter with it, bringing together scientific accuracy, sensory perception and public use of space. It gives our nearest star a new dimension: not just a distant object to contemplate, but a presence with which to reconnect—collectively.

Portrait of Luke Jerram with Helios ©Bec Hughes, House of Hues