Olafur Eliasson investigates how bodily and sensuous experiences lead to insights. Throughout his artistic production he has been concerned with how the physical world, nature’s fundamental elements, and basic phenomena such as light, darkness, and reflections can result in cognitive experience.

In the installation Your watercolour machine a floodlight projector directs its beams onto a prism, causing the light to be dispersed into separate colours which are then reflected in mirrors and the water surface of a pool and then, finally, projected onto a vertical screen, or canvas, where the field of colours meets us as a picture. A motor tilts the pool at regular intervals, disturbing the surface of the water, which in turn distorts the colours on the canvas, causing corresponding wavy movements.

In Eliasson’s work, the aesthetic experience arises as a response to a range of very concrete elements. The image on the classic, two-dimensional canvas arises out of basic physical phenomena, in the space occupied by the spectator. Eliasson’s installations create situations in which such new relationships between the work of art and the spectator can emerge.