It would seem that I’ve got a bit of a thing for strange hovering polyhedral shapes so I guess it’s no surprise that I’m really fond of this new work by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Called ‘Your Sound Galaxy’, Eliasson’s piece is an installation of geometric forms made from black metal that hang from the ceiling like lanterns.

In an interview with Thinking in Practice Eliasson talked about the importance of geometry in his work and he explained how mathematical form played it’s role in the creation of ‘Your Sound Galaxy’:

It consists of a group of twenty-seven polyhedra suspended from the ceiling and arranged in two horizontally concentric circles. The polyhedra are arranged in a clockwise sequence in which each form has more faces than the last. These are organisable into nine ‘families’ of three related forms. Two of the three are dual polyhedra – meaning that the number of vertices on the one polyhedron is equal to the number of faces on the other – and the third, hanging in the inner circle, is a combination of the two.

Again, it is very much about movement and time, because each polyhedron has an LED light at its centre, and when you walk around beneath the artwork, light sparkles through the cracks in the frames above, so that the viewer is instrumental in making a composition of light in transformation.

It’s a beautiful piece and I feel that Eliasson’s description of how it’s pieced together really demonstrates the thought and process which the artist puts into his work. If the old saying that ‘God is in the details’ is true then I reckon there really must be an awful lot of something special in this installation.