The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh
Artist Olafur Eliasson on Seeing What We’ve Been Blind To
14 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How can reconnecting with our senses change our perspective?
We want to feel that we are safe. We want to feel that we are good enough. This feeling requires somebody or something to see us. Culture, as I see it, is one of the languages that can make you feel seen, met, and heard.
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 need to unsee what I have been seeing all along. There's nothing more inspiring than accepting that you 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.
Thank you, Willow, and thank you for having me here on this podcast.
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.
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Chapter 2: What influence did Iceland's landscape have on Olafur Eliasson's art?
That means that summers, maybe Christmas, Easter holiday. And it meant that I spent a considerable amount of time being slow. One of my earliest memories that I have is that I was at my grandparents' house. It must have been 72, 73, where there was an oil crisis. Every night, I believe it was maybe after dinner or seven or eight o'clock, there would be a big bell in the city.
And then all this electricity of the city would be turned off to save electricity every night. I think it was every night. When we heard the bell, we ran to the window. My grandparents lived a little bit on the periphery of the city, overlooking the city, overlooking the harbour and the city. And there was this magic moment where all the lights would go off, like over the whole city, right?
But what was very special was that my grandmother typically would come with a candle then and we would sit by the window. We would look out the window into this very blue Icelandic light. And so when we talk about nature, we often think about a mountain or river or something. But in this case, the light that sort of fell into the room was this kind of incredibly blue Arctic summer, midnight sun.
It wasn't quite as north as midnight sun, but there was this kind of very strange light. You know, that was the city of Hafnarfjordur, it's called, and it was looking north. You are looking up to the very big glacier called Snæfellsnes, which is actually not very big anymore, but it was then. And that meant we were waiting for the sun to set and be behind Snæfellsnes. It had already gone down.
but it would still, from underneath the horizon, be able to illuminate the glacier.
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Chapter 3: How does Olafur Eliasson describe his early experiences with nature?
And this means, when it was exactly behind it, seen from Hapnerfjorde, it started to glow in this kind of incredible red and yellow and sort of burning colors.
So if I have any really profound memories of Iceland, it was this kind of connection between a social getting together almost around a campfire, this candle there on the table, us running around, me and my cousins, waiting for the sun to be glowing up this glacier. And I remember when I was in Denmark after the summer, I always thought of that.
kind of magic type of relationship with all these things that you somehow can see, but you can see if you make an effort. Things that are invisible, but if you really look, you can see more than you think. And that was somehow maybe the beginning of how I got more and more involved with nature, simply also because my family, or many families,
When you don't have money to travel abroad, which was expensive back then, you would go hiking and you would go camping, you have a tent, you go fishing, you do whatever the country allowed you to. My favorite spot in Iceland was a place called Landmannalauga, which means the pools for the people from the nation or something. And to get there, you could do a shortcut and go through Domadalur.
In that Domadalur, I noticed as a child, somebody had taken a jeep and driven up the side of a mountain through the moss. I mean, outside of the road. And then I got back the next year. Oh, it hasn't changed. Then I came back 10 years later. I mean, I kept going back to the same place. And if I go today... Now it's like a lifetime ago, right? Now it's like 50 years ago or something.
And the tracks are still there.
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Chapter 4: What parallels exist between ice and art in reflecting our world?
So talking about slowness, the particular kind of slowness that Arctic nature has, if you drive once over moss, it will basically take more than a lifetime for it to sort of repair itself. So that made me a bit somehow conscious about the environment and to not fool around and certainly not drive across it. And the fragility...
You know, this very fine quality of the blue light and the way it changed when the sun hit the glacier. The very, very fine changes in environment when the weather changed a little bit and the way the glaciers, they would actually be alive. It's not just a chunk of ice. They're constantly doing something. They're talking to you in a sense.
Or the way that if you drive across moss, that moss is just gone. It's not going to come back. So I started thinking of Iceland not necessarily as nature, but as culture or nature culture. Something that is actually, no matter what, already influenced or touched by human activities.
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?
Yeah, I think I was only 23 or 24 when I heard the word climate crisis or the fact that there was something in nature which was relativized by human activities. I am so old that I remember there was nature on one side and then culture on the other side, as I talked about before. And nature somehow was untouchable. It just was beyond what we could somehow influence.
When I walked and hiked when I was 18 or 16 or 20, when I hiked across Iceland, I was afraid of nature.
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Chapter 5: How does art help us process the climate crisis?
What would I do if there was a snowstorm suddenly? I was afraid of my life. I somehow learned to look at the clouds. I learned over the years to connect with nature. And in some way, I sensitized myself. I sort of cultivated simply because I had to, in a sense. When the river looks like this on the surface, I cannot walk across it. But over there, it looks like this on the surface.
I could wait, take off my boots and carry my backpack over there. And that somehow allowed for a degree of synchronizing that also had to do with time or slowness. Because you develop a sensitivity to kind of almost like a way of being defensive or to protect yourself. I was very lucky to develop this relationship with slowness or relationship with a sensitivity.
This climate psychologist who talks about the loss of this connection to nature being a collective trauma. Her name is Steffi Bettnerak. It's not a traditional trauma that you have from a car accident when you were a child or something like this. No, it's more like a collective, a little bit like a legacy trauma from 100 or maybe 200 years ago where we lost... through modernity.
The modernity took us away from nature. I find it very interesting that the inability to kind of connect with nature is one of the challenges, as I see it, we have around the climate and the climate crisis and the whole relationship with the environment.
Chapter 6: What role does culture play in making us feel seen and heard?
People are struggling to find the problem that they are facing within themselves. And when I started doing art, I wasn't really sure what I was looking for, but I had a sense of here is something that is invisible, but if I somehow work with it, I can make it visible.
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. And I think more so than solving climate change like a problem, I think more about how do we heal that trauma, right? How do we heal the trauma of separation? Part of why I was so excited to talk with you is because as a writer, I try to use language to help people reconnect to the living world.
And also, there's a certain point at which language fails, where words fail. I'm really interested in the space where art and the visual arts can carry us further into that sort of unspeakable place. And I'm wondering, do you think art can be what heals this trauma of separation?
Seeing something that we can't see is a little bit like sitting with the truth of something that has pain in it. Even if there is nothing we can do, we can still do something, and that is to sit with the truth. What I believe culture or work of art can do, it can bring to your attention a kind of need to face something that is an unmet need that you have, but you really don't like to address it.
When we talk about climate, it triggers a sensation of, maybe it gradually is getting a degree of despair, fear, this is so overwhelming, I don't know what to feel even.
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Chapter 7: How can art create safe spaces for emotional exploration?
I go about challenging the climate crisis with numbness. Sensitizing myself is actually uncomfortable. I get too nervous. So what is the ultimate need here? Well, evidently we have a need to feel safe. We want to feel that we matter and we want to feel that we are safe. We want to feel that we are good enough and that we're not a failure, right? This feeling requires somebody
or something to see us, to see, meet and hear what we have to say. Culture, as I see it, and now I'm generalizing a little bit, is one of the languages that can make you feel seen, met and heard. If you stand in front of, let's say, a painting, you are involved in an art installation, you are participating, somehow it is engaging, and importantly, it is embodied.
It's not like a screen-based kind of conversation. You are actually physically present. Let's take an example. You stand in front of a painting, you go, oh my God, I know that feeling. That is exactly what I was thinking about. That is exactly what I felt. That, intuitively, is what speaks to me. It is saying what I would have said if I had the words. I was just...
Chapter 8: What impact did the Ice Watch project have on urban audiences?
finding out how best to be present to that feeling that is in that painting. It is not me seeing the painting. It is the painting seeing me. It's the book that is reading me back. It is me in the book. I'm reading a book about myself. It is the theater play that is me on the stage. That dance or that ballet or whatever, that street theater, that culture has
has this kind of capacity to actually touch something deeper in you that is something that you are working on. And questions can be asked that cannot be asked by politicians or by completely cognitive environments. We can talk about things that would not be easy to talk about outside of cultural institutions. Cultural institutions are generally more inclusive and more pluralistic.
You can stand in front of the painting before and then, and I stand next to you and say, oh my God, that blue color. And then you say, I really don't connect with that blue. And I look at you and say, my God, that's interesting. And imagine now if this was politics in America, for instance, or if it was two British football teams. What? Liverpool? Oh my God, let's get into a fight.
It's so ridiculous that there is actually not a lot of spaces left where being different is actually an asset, diversity. And so there is a lot of, I think, trust around culture in its ability to reflect something that I've been working on, dealing with, and I haven't gotten around to it yet,
Thank you so much for having me. To sign up, you can visit us at atmos.earth.com. That's atmos.earth.com. And thank you. You brought in the word embodiment or embodied, which I really appreciate it because I think in so many ways that is an antidote to the numbness and the dissociation that often comes with trauma, right?
And I think the first work of yours that I saw in person was Riverbed in New York. And I remember having this feeling of seeing this ecosystem, but in the context of... a space that was so unnatural, right? And it brought me into my body in a way that... helped me to move forward, to feel, to process. And of course, there's so many questions around, okay, well, what comes after that?
How does that turn into action? But I think that that is deeply valuable. And I loved what you said around safety, because most people don't actually have the luxury of safety to process the news or now what they are scrolling through on their phones. And I'm curious, is that something that you are thinking about
often and consciously while you are creating your works is how can I make this a space that is safe for people to engage with something that is so ineffable?
I think a safe space is not safe in the way that it's defensive. It keeps everything out. It's not safe. It is safe in the sense that it sets you free to express your needs and the boundaries. And it gives you an opportunity to feel that being honest about your uncertainty is a strength. It holds the possibility of you saying, I don't know what to do.
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