Watch Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Riverbed’ come to life

Olafur Eliasson, Denmark b.1967 / Riverbed 2014 (installation view) / Installed for ‘Water’, GOMA, 2019–20 / Water, rock (volcanic stones (blue basalt, basalt, lava}, other stones, gravel, sand), wood, steel, plastic sheeting, hose, pumps / Installed dimensions variable / Purchased 2021. The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust / Collection: The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © 2014 Olafur Eliasson / Photograph: N Harth © QAGOMA

Olafur Eliasson, Denmark b.1967 / Riverbed 2014 (installation view) / Installed for ‘Water’, GOMA, 2019–20 / Water, rock (volcanic stones (blue basalt, basalt, lava}, other stones, gravel, sand), wood, steel, plastic sheeting, hose, pumps / Installed dimensions variable / Purchased 2021. The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust / Collection: The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © 2014 Olafur Eliasson / Photograph: N Harth © QAGOMA / View full image

The small stream that weaves through a landscape of water-rounded stones in Olafur Eliasson’s commanding and interactive Riverbed 2014 offers audiences a chance to explore, play, and ponder its existence. This interior-environment is out of place, without vegetation, birds or other markers of time and place, is it the very first landscape on Earth, an environment yet to spring into life, or is this the last precious water source in a barren, post-apocalyptic future?

Behind the vision of the renowned Danish/Icelandic artist and architect’s work was a huge team at QAGOMA all equipped with unique skill sets to transform an empty gallery in to an awe-inspiring rocky landscape.

Watch | Installation time-lapse

Riverbed 2014

Like many of Olafur Eliasson’s artworks, Riverbed is inspired by the rugged beauty of Iceland. While the artist was born in Denmark, his parents are both originally from Iceland and he visited his father there regularly throughout his childhood. The landscape within Riverbed is particular to Eliasson but also feels universal — a source landscape for us all.

In Iceland, as once-majestic glaciers melt they leave behind a bed of tumbled rock very like this. Immediately outside the gallery the Brisbane River flows, rising and falling with the tides. It is hard to imagine this wide river reduced to a fragile stream, but we need not travel far to observe the crippling effects of drought.

In Riverbed, everything we experience is carefully planned. Under the cool grey light, Eliasson seeks to take us into a deeper reality, amplifying our interaction with the world — our awareness of nature, the flow of time, and the choices we make.

We are all welcome to find our own way through Riverbed: we might follow the suggestion of a path, or find a quiet place to sit, touch the stones or feel the water pass through our fingers.

The water used in Riverbed is recycled via reservoir tanks installed behind the scenes.

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    Outside in: Behind the scenes of ‘Riverbed’ by Olafur Eliasson

    Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is known for big productions. The weather project — a huge fake sun in the Tate’s Turbine Hall — brought him attention in the early 2000s, and since then he has undertaken increasingly ambitious installations. In 2019 for the exhibition ‘Water’, QAGOMA invited Eliasson to reprise one of his largest projects, in which he re-creates a rocky stream inside a gallery, complete with flowing water. Working with his interdisciplinary studio of over 100 craftspeople, architects, archivists and filmmakers, QAGOMA and Eliasson brings a glacial landscape to Brisbane. Riverbed 2014 installed at the Gallery of Modern Art, 2019 Eliasson was born to Icelandic parents living in Copenhagen. When he was a child, his father moved back to Iceland, where the artist would go on to spend each summer holiday. Riverbed is his attempt to capture the Icelandic streams of his youth, and the soft grey light so particular to this northern country. The artist has often worked with water: in Green river 1998–2001, he turned six rivers a vivid green using the water-soluble dye uranine; and in New York City waterfalls 2008, he created four artificial waterfalls off bridges across the East River. We felt there was something special about Riverbed. The water in the work is quieter; it takes time to discover the flowing stream amongst the tonnes of grey rock. As Barlow remarks, Riverbed was selected, in part, because it speaks to the Australian experience of drought and our worries about the future: Eliasson has made so many works that relate to water. What attracted me to Riverbed was its relevance to the Australian experience of drought and complex cycles of time: the beginning of time and the end of time; linear flow or circular flow. Also the experiential and interactive quality — allowing us to touch water, not just see it. The work was first commissioned for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, just north of Copenhagen. QAGOMA’s iteration is the artist’s first attempt to remake the work, almost 15 500 kilometres from the original. Last year, Barlow visited Eliasson’s studio in Berlin to pitch for a second showing of Riverbed: It’s an incredibly ambitious work and not one the artist was planning to revisit, certainly not so far away. We had to convince the artist’s gallery, then his studio, that we were the right museum to tackle a project like this. It’s very unusual to have the talented team of designers that we do at QAGOMA. Riverbed is now the result of global collaboration. For over a year, our in-house team of exhibition designers, builders and carpenters have worked in tandem with the artist’s studio. Through many emails, Skype discussions and intricate 3-D modelling, the two teams have developed a vast river topography in response to GOMA’s architecture. This monumental installation disrupts the gallery space, appearing to be plucked straight from nature. Exhibition designer Megan Franks has worked closely with the artist’s studio to achieve this uncanny effect. She describes the many elements that come together in Eliasson’s installation: Riverbed is created by building a hand-cut timber-truss support frame, lined with waterproofing material, geotextile fabric, and covered by over 100 tonnes of sand, small river pebbles and large hand-selected basalt rocks. It’s also fitted with pump systems to regulate the flow of water through the channel. The foundations of the work follow the standard building techniques found in architecture — timber studs and frames — just on a very large scale. We are always sourcing varied materials working with different artists, but this has been one of the largest sourcing projects I have worked on! In the original version of Riverbed, Eliasson imported Icelandic stones to Denmark, but from early discussions, it was clear that the same could not be done here. Over many months, Franks contacted local landscaping suppliers and tested small samples of rock that arrived on her desk. Her hunt for the perfect stones required much trial and error, from measuring samples against real Icelandic stones to testing the durability of different types of black sand. She explains: It was quite difficult to find stones that matched the volcanic aesthetic in a specific shade of grey . . . We wanted rocks that achieved the same basalt and volcanic nature of the stones while also being sourced from local suppliers. When we were first sourcing the rocks, the show had not been publicly announced, so we had to explain the exhibition to suppliers, and they thought, ‘Oh yeah, so a few bags of rock?’ They were quite taken aback when I replied, ‘No, enough to cover 600 metres squared!’ The majority of the rocks come from Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, with some harder-to-find pebbles from suppliers in the Asia Pacific region. The decision to go with local and regional rock supplies was not just to abate logistical concerns; the art world is increasingly conscious of its own environmental impact, with material waste, shipping across the world, and numerous flights all contributing to the worsening climate emergency. How to achieve this work — which invites us to think deeply about nature — without harming the environment in the process In other words, how do we make a metaphor responsibly? Of course, this is the broader challenge — both ethically and practically — of bringing international art to Australia. Restaging Riverbed also required particular ingenuity in design. GOMA’s architecture is of a markedly different time and place to the modernist Louisiana Museum in which the work was first presented. Our building does not invite the same meandering pathways and its double-height spaces tower over the Louisiana’s domestic scale. These differences posed a new problem for Eliasson’s studio. In the second iteration of Riverbed, the question was not only ‘how to bring the outside landscape inside’, but also, ‘how to bring a foreign landscape inside a significantly different space’. As such, the work takes on...
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    Olafur Eliasson traces his artistic practice over 25 years

    Renowned Danish-Icelandic artist and UNDP Goodwill Ambassador Olafur Eliasson traces his artistic practice over the last 25 years in a keynote address while in Brisbane for the opening of the exhibition ‘Water’. From early works like Beauty 1993, seminal installations like The weather project 2003, to his monumental work Riverbed 2014 in the QAGOMA Collection — Eliasson’s practice spans a broad range of media and inspires conversation about how art can turn thinking into doing in the world. Watch | Olafur Eliasson & his art practice Olafur Eliasson (right) viewing Riverbed 2014 installed at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2019 Watch | Riverbed comes to life
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