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6 Apr 2023
Liza
Costello
Full Moon
Journey to
Sri Lanka
After Olafur Eliasson’s
The Weather Project
We entered London
to see the sun in a room
– a dignified hostage,
generous in its captivity,
turning even the mood golden.
Have you ever before seen
people bask in an art gallery?
Then a drug-eased daylong flight,
and we were knocking along
a skinny, wilful road
through astonishing jungle,
orange flash of a monk’s robes,
on and on until the light went
and the sound of sea came.
The first guesthouse took us in.
In the bath, a spider
hunched, but we slept deep
until omelettes on the beach.
There above was the sun again, freed
by the sky to be small as it dared
and too bright to gaze on.
Behind the poem...
Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project was exhibited in the Tate Modern in 2003. A huge installation that took up the entire space of that gallery, it depicted the sun rising through a fine mist. Everything in the hall was reduced to the colours orange and black; the work giving its viewers the illusion of being very close to the sun. In fact, half of it was a mirrored ceiling – reflecting not only its other half, but also the hall and viewers below.