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Summary and contact details For over twenty five years Joanna Migdal has designed, hand engraved and personally made all the sundials that she has sold. Commissions of exceptional size are made under her close supervision in a well-known London engineering company, which specialises in sculpture. Each dial is designed for the latitude of its site. Many celebrate the birthdays, marriages and other important events in the lives of her clients, the shadows recording the exact dates annually. “A well-made dial can mark any special days in a client’s year,” she says, “and so they are all intensely personal.” Her one-off designs have ranged from the staunchly traditional (but accurate) garden dials, to highly charged abstract work. Commissions range from small to vast dials which require earth moving equipment and even cranes to install. Examples can be seen from the City of London, through Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong, and through Australia to America. Indeed it is possible that in any twenty-four hour period, the sun is always shining on one or other example of Joanna’s work. Like many successful artists, Joanna’s ambition has always been to understand and reflect the “genius of the place” in which her dials are to be installed. Similarly she delights in understanding and reflecting the desires of those who commission her. Unusually she combines these goals with a desire to work as far as possible by the intriguing rules of “Divine Proportion”. This is a mathematical formula first observed by the ancients, which has been known and employed in architecture and in the fine and applied arts from classical times. It is sparingly used today, but Joanna takes particular pleasure in exploiting the ancient formula’s ability to provide lasting aesthetic beauty, whatever the project. She is perhaps the only sundial maker to rely entirely on hand-engraving, regularly designing new fonts and cutting special letter forms for her commissions e-mail: jam@sundialsomething.com Or dial +44 (0)1491 412962 |