A wide, muddy wetland plain with branching, water-filled channels weave toward distant low hills, with pale grey patches of ground and a cloudy sky above.

Iceland series #48, #53, #56, #64 2005

Olafur Eliasson’s Iceland series of photographs is expansive and ongoing. These images from the series were taken along the Goose Lake Trail (Gæsavatnaleið). We see quicksilver channels of water weaving their way over dark brown sand and gravel towards a larger river. Against these colours, the light and clouds are particularly dramatic.

‘Iceland is made of a highland, where nobody lives,’ says Eliasson, ‘and a lowland, and water runs from the highland to the lowland and on into rivers and the ocean. It carves these canyons into the mountains with these incredible riverbeds.’ The landscape and light are spectacular but also challenging to navigate.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Curator’s Persective

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Iceland is Olafur's ancestral home. It's not the country where he was born, this is Denmark and the city of Copenhagen. But as a child, and throughout his life, he has constantly returned to the place where his parents were born and his grandparents come from.

In this first room of the exhibition, we introduce Olafur through a sense of this place, which is so incredibly special to him. It's very different from Brisbane, isn't it, with our beautiful sunshine and blue skies? Here we sense the volcanic history of Iceland, a country which is constantly changing itself. The dramatic black stone plateaus, white snow and glacial ice.

It is a distant land surrounded by ocean. There are very few trees. The compass suspended above the photographs and artworks in this room is made out of a piece of wood, which would have travelled across oceans. Perhaps from somewhere like Siberia moving down a river and being battered upon distant rocky shores, floating for years before coming to ground on the coast of Iceland.

Olafur has made this work into a compass attaching a flotilla of small magnets, which together enable it to point North, working from the magnetic energy of our earth itself. Another work, Parabolic Planet 2010 presents a small sculpture, a little bit like the earth, lit from behind by a single light source, a little bit like our sun.

And all around there are images, photographs, which Olafur has taken over many years. This is just a small fraction of a vast number of photographs. Olafur uses his camera and the process of making art to see the world anew, to question and explore what he sees. Many of these works are created in series, so you see a grid of images.

In each grid Olafur slices, time into little fractions. There's a small cloud which forms over a period of minutes, glacial ice, which melts over weeks. And the setting sun in the Heckla Twilight Series.

This landscape is dramatic and vast. One of my favourite works shows a river moving across a rocky plateau and then cascading down in a dramatic waterfall. We see a rainbow at the base of this. Rainbows and light recur throughout Olafur's practice. You'll see them again and again, in ways which ask us to question our usual experience of a rainbow on a rainy day. There's also a watercolour of a rainbow in this room.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Curator’s Persective

A wide, muddy wetland plain with branching, water-filled channels weave toward distant low hills, with a cloudy sky above.

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These four photographs from the Iceland series [#48, #53, #56, #64] 2005 show views of a river as it journeys down from the mountains and nears the flat plains towards the sea. We see sand and earth and rocks against grey skies, at times radiant with light. Some might find it a sombre landscape. Certainly, it is dramatic, but there's also a quicksilver quality to the way that the light reflects in the water and against the rocks, constantly changing. In the third image from the left, we can see mountains rise in the distance. We're not sure if we're looking to the top of them or if this is perhaps concealed by the cloud? The cloud itself is lit by the light. Iceland is a country of dramatic contrasts. Everything that seems stable is also in movement.

These rocks and sand and rivers shift their course each spring as the glaciers melt. The rhythm of the seasons in Iceland is shifting and changing as our earth warms. The glaciers are retreating and disappearing. Sometimes this earth, that looks stable here, is in fact like quicksand. The third image along surprised me, when Olafur mentioned that he'd stopped the car to take this picture and then became worried that they might be bogged and not able to leave. ‘It was a little bit concerning and frightening,’ he said. In the foyer cabinet outside the entry to the exhibition, you'll see another series of photographs of rivers with cars in them. It's called the Cars in Rivers series, and it shows what happens when people get stuck trying to cross a river that might have shifted its course or be a little deeper than expected. Iceland has a fairly small population and, like Australia, a vast landscape, which at times people need to find ingenious ways to cross.

These images here show us the landscape as a kind of optical device: dramatic, lit by clouds and light, its very earth, constantly moving and shifting as volcanoes and seasonal melts redefine it.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Low/no vision audio description

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The Iceland series consists of four large colour photographs, each measuring 60 by 90 centimetres. Displayed in a single horizontal row on the gallery wall, the works are evenly spaced, giving the series a balanced rhythm and inviting viewers to not only read the sequence from left to right but also to consider the images on their own. Each photograph was taken in 2005 during a trip Eliasson took along the Goose Lake Trail (Gæsavatnaleið), and together the four works depict the effects of the light and atmosphere upon Iceland’s dramatic landscape.

The photograph on the far left shows a dark volcanic plain, its surface etched with ridges and patterns. In the distance, low mountains are partly veiled by mist creeping down from a cloudy sky. The next photograph captures a braided river system, pale channels of water cutting through ochre and brown earth, with distant ridges on the horizon. The third image presents a flat expanse of volcanic sand beneath a sky heavy with low-hanging clouds, a solitary mountain visible in the distance. And the fourth, final photograph depicts another sand plain streaked with pale sediment, its horizon line softened under diffuse light.

Far from merely documenting the Icelandic landscape, these images reflect on our relationship with nature, the physical space in which we exist and the body’s felt motion through space. Their uniform presentation emphasises both the individuality of each image and their shared atmosphere of vastness, solitude and shifting terrain.

– QAGOMA

A wide expanse of dark, granular ground scattered with small rocks extends toward low, cloud-covered hills beneath a dense grey sky.

A broad expanse of dark, rippled earth and silt extends toward a low, rounded hill under a cloudy sky, with multitudinous thin water channels and scattered grey patches visible across the barren, wetland terrain.

Room: ‘Iceland’

Olafur Eliasson returns regularly to Iceland. Although now based in Berlin, he was born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents. As a child, he would spend summers with his grandparents near Reykjavík. Moving between these different landscapes has shaped his artistic practice in profound ways. Experiencing such distinct ways of life, qualities of place and phenomena of light, was critical in shaping his focus on how we perceive and understand the world. Moving from place to place, this effect is heightened: ‘When I looked at a shadow or at melting ice, I wanted to document something I could see, but others might not register,’ he says. ‘For my Icelandic family and friends there was no need to tell a story they already knew.’

Eliasson pays close attention to his surroundings. In his photographs, we see an alertness to different qualities of light and landscape, time and its rhythms. We also see a focus on how people orient themselves and adapt to the country’s harsh climate. The Hekla twilight series 2006 captures subtle changes of light and colour as dusk falls over the snow-covered mountain. We explore a landscape of rivers shaped by glacial meltwater, snow-capped plateaus and tumbling waterfalls through Eliasson’s eyes and camera lens. A rainbow appears cradled by the landscape itself at the base of a waterfall, then is painstakingly recreated in thin veils of watercolour. From a small piece of Icelandic lava rock, Eliasson constructs a model planet, lit by a hidden sun.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Iceland series #48, #53, #56, #64 2005

Curator’s Persective

Curator’s Persective

Room: ‘Iceland’

Other works from ‘Iceland’:

Curator’s Persective

Curator’s Persective

Room: ‘Iceland’

Other works from ‘Iceland’: