Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.)
Fujiko Nakaya (born 1933) · 1998
At intervals throughout the day the pool beside the museum begins to breathe out mist. Within a minute a thick white cloud rolls over the water, swallows the terrace, softens the titanium curves and drifts under the bridge before the breeze takes it away. Visitors caught in it laugh, disappear, then reappear damp and delighted. There is nothing solid to look at, and that is the idea. Fujiko Nakaya has spent half a century making sculptures out of pure water vapour.
The fog is real water forced through hundreds of tiny nozzles at very high pressure, producing droplets so fine that they float rather than fall, the same size as the droplets in natural cloud. Nakaya works with meteorologists to tune each installation to the local wind and humidity, so this one behaves differently in Bilbao's damp climate than her fogs in Australia or California. Watch how the cloud interacts with the building: it clings to the stone, slides off the metal and pools in the hollows Gehry left at the base of the walls. The sculpture is never the same twice.
Nakaya first made fog for the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka Expo in nineteen seventy, working with the collective Experiments in Art and Technology, and has since wrapped bridges, gardens and museums around the world in her clouds. Her father was the physicist who made the first artificial snow crystals, so shaping weather runs in the family. Here the work was commissioned for the museum's opening year and has become one of the pleasures of the place, especially in the evening when Yves Klein's fire fountain flares beside it and the pool holds mist and flame at once.
Did You Know? Nakaya gives every fog she makes a catalogue number like a scientist logging experiments, and this one is number 08025 in her list.
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