Presence seems to bring an enormous golden glowing sphere into the space of the gallery. How did Olafur make it, and imagine it, especially for us here in Brisbane?
As we were working on the development of the exhibition, over a number of years, Olafur and I often spoke about the idea of an artwork being generated from a wedge of mirrors standing in space with some kind of optical device at their centre. Olafur was intrigued by what it meant to stand in such a wedge and see yourself reflected many times over. We see another version of this idea in the artwork There Are No Bad Parts [2026], on the other side of the room, where the angle is different — 60 degrees. So we see ourselves here six times, or one time for real and five times in the mirror, and four times in Presence.
What does it mean to see our ‘self’ reflected multiple times over? To see a circle of our selves?
Olafur had been looking at the work of the American psychotherapist Richard Schwartz, [a book] called There Are No Bad Parts, and his ideas around ‘internal family systems’ [IFS]: the idea that each of us is made up of a group of different parts, and that in listening to and exploring and hearing each of these parts, we can come to a greater peace or ease within our self.
So, this very dramatic, large-scale optical artwork that seems to take us out into the universe, in fact, came about through partly a process of self-questioning and self-exploration.
So, we looked at many different ways of presenting this wedge of mirrors, and in the end, opened this [angle] out to 90 degrees so that we could embrace a larger field of people. Olafur then saw a video that NASA had produced, drawing upon data gathered by a probe that was sent around the sun, [nick-]named ‘Icarus’. [Formally named the Parker Solar Probe,] this probe picked up new data and allowed a much more accurate visualisation of the heat and energy and light of the sun.
So, from NASA's video and visualisation, Olafur and his team at the studio started to test ways to make a new version of that pattern to simulate this sense of movement, energy, dynamism that we see in the surface of the sun when we come closer to it.
When you come close to the sculpture and artwork itself, you'll see there's an outer layer of a square mesh grid and then, inside, about 20 centimetres beneath that, you can see a fabric with a pattern on it. It too has a kind of grid, but the [lines] almost curve, like little clouds of curves, to this meshed grid. So we have two layers of pattern separated from each other and, as we walk around beneath the artwork, optically our movement creates this impression of moiré — of movement.
From behind, the artwork is lit by mono [monochromatic] yellow, mono-frequency lights. [Lights like] these were used for many years as streetlights. They take out differences in colour rendering. Some people talk about them reducing the world to tones of grey. I think of it as a very orange-toned grey. You'll see that differences in our skin colour or what we're wearing are not nearly as noticeable in this yellow, mono-frequency light. Olafur used these same lights to create another artwork at the Tate Turbine Hall in London, named The Weather Project 2003. It was a half-flat half-disc of yellow light, which was then seen in a full ceiling of mirror foil, so this created the impression of a full disc, or circle, or sphere — from a distance — the sun.
Olafur might often return to an idea years later and make it in another version, so this sun here we see is much closer to us. Our ceiling height is about six-and-a-half meters. At the Tate, it was over 20 meters. That work was flat; this work exists in three dimensions, pushing into the space. That work had the single yellow colour, and this work uses this moiré effect to create an impression of movement. It also sits in a gallery space with two other works, which create a dialogue of spheres, circles, and half circles, mirrors and reflections.
