The Melting World
Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Ice Watch’ is a recurring work of public art that connects us with the world as physical and emotional beings
Environmental art has been a thing since the mid-nineteenth century but has moved to the forefront of culture over the last few decades. Now, to coincide with COP26 (the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference), a plethora of environmentally aware arts and activism events are scheduled in and around the host city of Glasgow, Scotland …and beyond. After all, it’s a global issue being discussed.
This has become a tradition, for artists and collectives to add their passion and poetic responses to the statistical-wrangling, fact-selecting, platitudes, and, to quote Greta Thunberg, the blah-blah-blah, within the conference centre. Art can be a powerful mode of cultural democracy and has pushed for meaningful engagement alongside political debate on many subjects of great importance.
One of the most ambitious and eloquent of those past responses was by the Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson. For the first iteration of Ice Watch, in 2014, he organised the transport of 12 huge blocks of glacial ice, recovered from the sea off the diminishing Greenland ice sheet, and placed them on the streets of Copenhagen. This coincided with the COP20 in Lima, Peru…
