Flashback

Artist Olafur Eliasson on touching (and filming) the void

I GREW UP PARTLY in Denmark with my parents and partly in Iceland with my grandparents. My father then moved home to Iceland when my parents divorced. So I was like a ping-pong ball between the two countries.

In 1973, when I was six, the oil crisis hit and oil and petroleum were rationed in Iceland, so we had car-free days. I remember sitting by the window in my grandparents’ apartment, looking out over the city – street lamps and houses all lit up, then at seven o’clock a big bell would ring and the whole city turned black. My grandma would take out a candle and we would sit by the window in the blue twilight to read, or my grandmother would knit. I think that was what originally drew my focus to the ephemeral quality of light.

Much later, I became interested in global warming and the greenhouse effect, and their impact on the Icelandic glaciers, which are not just melting from the top but also from within. The glaciers are disappearing into the moulins, which are like giant water holes running through them, and there are lakes underneath, which are now becoming vast. Occasionally, they break out and run into the ocean.

I wanted to document them, in an attempt to show the amazing nature of the glaciers – but also to draw attention to the fact that there is a lot of the glacier that we don’t see because the action is happening inside or underneath it.

In 2007, I travelled around Iceland, photographing moulins – I believe 60 in total, some of which were big enough to drive a car into. As you can see from this image, I took pictures by fixing an aluminium ladder from the local hardware store to the top of a 4x4 glacier vehicle. And then I would back the car up to the hole, as close as I could get, so that the ladder would hang above it.

It’s scary lying down on that, though I did have a safety harness. The moulin is between 600 and 1,000 feet deep. It’s a huge black void – you can just about see the water cascading down, and the sound of the river in the glacier is a deep humming. It’s both beautiful and scary – a bit like listening to Stockhausen.

Also on this trip was my childhood friend, Günther Vogt, a landscape architect from Switzerland. My ambition was to show him some real glaciers, because obviously the Swiss glaciers are a bit tidy with all those pointy mountains called the Alps around them. I was just poking fun. I always try to bring a scientist along when I travel – for company, but also so I don’t miss out on learning anything.

A moulin is a huge black void – you can just about see the water cascading down. It’s both beautiful and scary

Olafur Eliasson prepares to photograph one of the moulins – shafts in the glacier