“In 1999 I traveled to Iceland to document a number of the country’s glaciers from the air. Back then, I thought of the glaciers as beyond human influence. . . They seemed immobile, eternal. I was struck at the time by the difference between the human scale and the scale of geo-history. For me a glacier or a rock seem solid, but on the geological scale, rocks and glaciers are constantly in motion.”
—Olafur Eliasson
Both topographical illustration and scientific study, Eliasson’s Glacier Series examines our perception of nature as simultaneously eternal and ever-changing. His aerial views foreground the massive scale of the glaciers, isolating them in a moment in time despite their constant, if incremental, state of flux – a force powerful enough to carve the formation of the earth’s surface over thousands of years, but moving at mere inches a day. Eliasson’s work engages the discrepancies between representation and reality, as well as between human time and geologic time.
These photographs now exist as a historical document of man’s influence on the environment, and Eliasson’s Glacier Series has since expanded into The Glacier Melt Series (1999/2019). In recent years Eliasson has revisited the sites of his original photographs and recaptured the current landscape, illustrating their marked contrast due to the impacts of global warming. Now a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, Eliasson has achieved a higher level of recognition for his work, thus putting him in dialogue with leaders who can enact climate change policy on a large-scale.
