Where earth meets sky, find Fujiko Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya’s landmark fog sculptures have graced festivals and biennales across the world since the 1970s. They are sited in parks and on the grounds of museums world-wide, but the National Gallery’s Foggy wake in a desert: An ecosphere was the first of the artist’s fog sculptures to enter a permanent collection.

In 1976, Nakaya’s Fog sculpture #94768: Earth talk 1976 became the 2nd Biennale of Sydney’s signature work. Surrounded by fine mist on the lawns of the Domain, opposite the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Nakaya worked with an assistant over two weeks to install her sculpture. Described by the artist as ‘fog for people to look into and feel,’ the sculpture became a favourite with the public and other artists who responded to it.

This is the work that now ‘performs’ in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden — reconfigured and retitled in 1982 for the specially landscaped Canberra setting — beside the pond and wafting amongst casuarinas. With its relocation, the work gained a new number: #94925, being the code for the nearest weather station.

Now, nine-hundred nozzles pump a delicate mist, from 12.30 to 2pm daily, creating an engaging and ephemeral work of art: a joyous encounter on a hot day, an element of mystery through the bleakness of winter.

As Nakaya explains, her fog sculpture is ‘an interactive sculpture created in response to the meteorological and topographical conditions of its environment. Moulded by the atmosphere and sculpted by wind from moment to moment, its ever-changing form is a probe in real time of the place where it is created. Being a phenomena like natural fog, it is also an artefact.’

Nakaya’s sculpture is designed, as the title suggests, to be a self-sustaining ecosphere in Canberra’s harsh conditions; it activates the natural environment, thickening the foliage and cultivating a range of species. The site was landscaped to the artist’s specifications, and her approach is precise to the point of being scientific. She cites the influence of her father’s research. Ukichiro Nakaya was a physicist at Hokkaido University, renowned for his pioneering work on artificial snow and ice.

Nakaya’s fog sculptures developed from a collaboration with Kyoto University, and the original project examined the impact of inserting a one square-kilometre fog in desert conditions, recording the climatic and ecological changes over a period of ten years. In 1989, the artist took out a patent (#1502386) for making ‘cloud sculptures from water-fog’ and, more recently, has created major works for both architectural structures and natural surrounds.

At a time when audiences are craving immersive experiences in museum spaces, and more than forty years after its installation for the Biennale, we celebrate Foggy wake in a desert: An ecosphere as an extraordinary part of the Gallery’s permanent collection and identity. The more you give, the more it returns.