Oh hey, that collab Olafur Eliasson did with his father Elias Hjörleifsson that was mentioned a couple of years ago just turned up for auction in Denmark. [two, actually.]
Olafur and Elias, an artist and sailor, used several related techniques to make drawings that mapped the motion of a boat under a suspended or loose pen.
The wave moving on the sea between Greenland and Iceland, 1999, was made in the dining area of Hjörleifsson’s ship, Maria Helga AK-16, a freezer trawler that, more than twenty years later, was still fishing and studying the sea between Greenland and Iceland. [Hmm, the ship was called the Haraldur Kristjansson until December 1999, a tight window for production. Perhaps Elias worked on the ship before the name change, too.] The diagonally mirrored composition here suggests that Elias rotated the sheet at some point, and changed the diameter of whatever circles he used to constrain the swinging pens.
Elias passed away in 2001, and Olafur continued to explore motion mapping drawing techniques.
21 Oct 2025, 2543/7905: The wave moving on the sea between Greenland and Iceland, 1999, est. 25-30,000 DKK [update: sold for 26000 DKK, + 33% buyer’s premium and artist resale royalty, or 34.6K][bruun-rasmussen.dk]
Previously, related: a Hjörleifsson drawing: Map of the boat under the pen
Mapping Olafur Mapping