A close-up of a suspended driftwood log in front of a white wall, its midsection encased in a delicate lattice of metal rods connected with intricate joints.

Lost compass 2013

Suspended just above our heads is Lost compass 2013. At the centre of this work is a weathered driftwood log found on a beach on the north coast of Iceland. The log would have travelled for years, perhaps decades, on the currents of the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans before reaching the coast. Its sun- and salt-bleached surface, as well as its rounded edges, trace this long journey. Less than one per cent of Iceland is covered in forest, so driftwood is an important source of timber.

A framework of cylindrical magnets encircles the driftwood log like a protective force field. Viewed head-on, the magnets take the form of an eight-pointed star, another beacon. Olafur Eliasson is fascinated by navigational tools and maps. Made from a material that has travelled vast distances, this compass points north, offering us a shared point of orientation and reminding us of our position on Earth in relation to the sun.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Curator’s Persective

0:00

Lost Compass 2013 is the first artwork we see as we enter the exhibition ‘Olafur Eliasson: Presence’. It hangs suspended above our heads as we look around this first room of photographs of the extraordinary landscape of Iceland.

Lost Compass. The title of the work seems a conundrum. The very tool meant to show us the way is perhaps itself lost. At the centre of the artwork is a long piece of driftwood, perhaps four meters in length: the trunk of a tree which might have come from somewhere far away — from Iceland, perhaps — falling over, then moving down a river, reaching the ocean and then travelling without land in sight for years, perhaps decades, slowly becoming rounded, losing its limbs and other features to become this long log that we see suspended above us.

Olafur then has taken this from the shores of Iceland and created a compass from it by adding all the little magnetic rods that you see, like a flotilla of small spaceships gathered into this geometric stainless-steel form.

If you step to either end of the work and look at it from that perspective, you'll see the shape of a star. So, the rods orient the driftwood to the magnetic energy of the Earth, just like any other old-style compass, but not like our phones or mapping systems that we use so often today.

Olafur has been long interested in navigation and how we find our way. Not only the actual tools of navigation, which were so important to his ancestors on their journey to Iceland, as well as [to Olafur's] father, who was a cook on one of the big offshore Icelandic fishing boats. But also as a kind of metaphor — the compass as a tool to help us find our way through the uncertainty of the world, through the many decisions that we need to make over the course of our life.

Later on in the exhibition, you'll see another navigational artwork called Your Lost Lighthouse [2020], and an enormous work, which is called Riverbed [2014], and offers us a landscape without any single path, asking us to find our own way. So the compass really welcomes us to the exhibition and a set of ideas and questions which have long been important to Olafur.

– Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow

Low/no vision audio description

0:00

This suspended sculpture measures just over four metres in length, and a little over one metre in both height and depth. At its centre is a single piece of driftwood, long and cylindrical, with an uneven, weathered surface. Its colour is a muted grey-brown, showing signs of bleaching and erosion from the sea. Anchored to the ceiling by a single support, the log is suspended horizontally above head height, parallel to the floor, so that its ends extend outward into the gallery space. Encircling the driftwood is a delicate framework of stainless-steel rods and small cylindrical magnets. The rods crisscross in diamond-shaped patterns, creating a lattice that appears to hover just above the wood’s surface. When viewed from the side, the magnets take the form of an eight-pointed star. The steel glimmers faintly under the gallery lights, in sharp contrast to the rough, matt texture of the driftwood.

The sculpture is aligned precisely along the Earth’s north–south axis, held in position by the magnetic structure. Appearing both weighty and weightless, the driftwood seems to float in mid-air. The presence of this material shaped by ocean currents, suspended within a geometric system of orientation, evokes both natural processes and navigational tools.

– QAGOMA

A man stands inside a white-walled gallery beside a long, suspended log that is intersected at its centre by a complex, geometric, metal structure.

A driftwood log suspended horizontally in front of a white wall, surrounded by a symmetrical web of metallic rods and connectors.

Thin rods form a delicate network of triangular shapes that extend outwards from the log’s surface, with cylindrical metal connectors connecting the geometric lattice.

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

Other works from ‘Iceland’:

Experience this work on the Sense Trail