A monumental mirror to the sky is to be created in a wildly beautiful but little visited stretch of coastline for Olafur Eliasson’s first permanent outdoor artwork in the UK.
Eliasson is one of the world’s most popular artists, known for his mesmerising, often mind-bending experiments with nature and the weather.
In a collaboration with the nature writer Robert Macfarlane, Eliasson has won a contest to create a landmark public artwork for the west Cumbrian coastline. The work was selected from four ideas which also included proposals from the artists Rachel Whiteread and Roger Hiorns and the garden designer Piet Oudolf.
The Eliasson team hopes to “astonish” people. Provisionally titled Your Daylight Destination, the idea is to use a beach near the village of Silecroft as a stage for an artwork which uses the twice-daily tides to create a thing, they hope, of wonder.
A 30-metre steel elliptical basin will be installed on the mud flats, like some sort of strange sea vessel which has just landed. At high tide it will be submerged and when the tide goes out the water will remain in the basin.
There will be a viewing platform and from there, looking through rings, the basin will – because of optical trickery – appear circular and be like a mirror, reflecting the sun, moon, sky and weather.
Aldo Rinaldi, who chaired the judging panel, expects it to be a “spellbinding” experience which people will want to return to.
Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist, said he was excited at the prospect of having a permanent work in the UK.
“Sometimes you feel fortunate to be an artist because it is a beautiful landscape, special people and it’s public,” he said. “Robert is a wonderful wordsmith so I was very humbled and grateful for the opportunity to participate.”
Eliasson said he was excited by the west Cumbrian weather and its incredible sunsets. “It is quite beautiful weather, even when it rains … but you don’t find a lot of tourist brochures advertising the wonderful rain of the area.”
A starting point for the idea was an event in Iceland three years ago when a funeral was held for its first glacier lost to climate breakdown. A plaque was left which was a letter to the future explaining how humans knew how it had happened and what needed to be done. “Only you know if we did it,” read the last line.
Eliasson said he asked MacFarlane something along the lines of: “Maybe we could do a project that could be about listening to messages of your not yet living version of yourself?”
MacFarlane was interested and talked about the “will-have-been” perspective he writes about in his 2019 book Underland.
He also drew Eliasson’s attention to pre-historic cup and ring carvings made across northern Europe in the Neolithic and bronze ages. Some of the most famous examples are on boulders in the Lake District valleys of Grasmere, Langdale and Crummock.
In the planned artwork the pool is effectively the cup, looked at through rings from a platform on the dunes.
Macfarlane said the hope was to make Copeland district’s “hidden coast” visible.
Eliasson and his studio in Berlin have made a number of public art works across the world including what appears to be some kind of large and forgotten astronomical instrument, made from steel and glass, on the top of a mountain in the Italian Alps.
He made his name in the UK in 2003 when he filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with a dazzling fake sun. It has been described as a “milestone in contemporary art” and many visitors spent a considerable time basking in its weirdly warm glow.
Eliasson has been called “art’s weatherman”. He is an entertainer but also seen as someone who wants to encourage people to have a greater awareness of the way they engage with and interpret the world.
At his big Tate Modern show in 2019 visitors encountered a huge wall covered in reindeer lichen, walked along a 45-metre corridor of dense, luminous fog or just managed to glimpse a rainbow in a thin mist of drizzle.
The planned work is part of a wider art programme called Deep Time, which will also feature smaller permanent art works along the Lake District coast. It has been commissioned by Copeland borough council using money from the government’s coastal communities fund.
Rinaldi said he hoped the Eliasson work would be in place within two years.
