Parabolic planet

Olafur Eliasson has described his artworks as ‘devices for the experience of reality’. He often incorporates elemental materials such as water and light in a fusion of science and art, investigating and recontextualizing naturally occurring phenomena.

While Eliasson is renowned for his large-scale installations, he also creates work on a more intimate scale, as seen here in his kinetic sculpture 'Parabolic planet'. For this work Eliasson has suspended a piece of volcanic material in front of a round concave mirror. As the illuminated rock turns slowly on its axis, its inverted reflection takes on the appearance of a planet revolving in space, the craggy details of its surface magnified and distorted by the shaped mirror.

Eliasson was born in Denmark, but his parents are Icelandic and he spent much of his childhood in the wild, elemental landscapes of their homeland. He has often mentioned a desire to recapture the Iceland of his childhood in his art and frequently revisits materials and themes relating to the geological phenomena associated with volcanic landscapes.