Willow Defebaugh

I'm your host, Willow Defabaugh, and this is the nature of nature.

As a writer, I have spent years trying to help people reconnect with nature and feel what's happening to the earth through language.

But some things are beyond words, and language can only carry us so far.

That's why I was so looking forward to speaking with this week's guest, the illustrious artist, Olafur Eliasson.

Over the last few decades, Olafur has brought waterfalls to the Brooklyn Bridge, melting glacial ice to major cities, and even recreated the sun indoors.

His art helps bring new perspective and even open our eyes to where we might have been blind.

I'm Willow Dufferbaugh, and this is The Nature Of, where we look to the nature of our world for wisdom and ideas that change the way we live.

This week, I'm sitting down with Icelandic Danish artist, Olafur Eliasson, to talk about the power of art in helping us touch the intangible and letting ourselves be touched in return.

I'm a huge admirer of your work and so honored to have you on the show, so thank you.

You've spoken about how growing up between Denmark and Iceland really influenced you in terms of seeing the landscape up close, seeing our changing planet up close.

When I think about Iceland in particular, the landscape is so elemental and so dynamic.

I'm curious as a starting point if you can speak a little bit to how that shaped the relationship between creativity and the natural world for you.

It's such a beautiful story and a fitting symbol to start this conversation with, because what really struck me in what you were sharing was the parallels, I think, between ice and art in terms of reflecting the world back to us, and your art in particular, in terms of filtering and dealing with our perception of the world around us that is changing and

What jumped out to me was the tension between the slowness you're describing of the living world in Iceland, and yet also compared to the rest of the world with the climate crisis, how fast in many ways it's changing with glacial melt.

How have you kind of observed that tension and seeing the landscape not change, as you've recalled, but also change?

I wanna come back to what you were sharing around trauma because I think about this quite a lot.

When we experience a trauma, what often happens is the left and right sides of the brain stop talking to each other.

The rational part and the feeling part say, we can't process this, we can't deal with this.

And it's almost as if the trauma falls into the fissure in between.

And so trauma in many ways is a separation.