Berndnaut Smilde creates indoor clouds that last for just 10 seconds.
A regular Berndnaut Smilde sculpture only lasts for about 10 seconds. That’s just enough time to take a picture of it. His sculptures are unique and airy. Smilde creates tiny clouds that look perfect in all sorts of indoor places, like coal mines and cathedrals.
He’s been doing it for many years now and names the growing collection Nimbus. Just last month, he showcased his weather magic at Frieze New York. There, Smilde invited people to watch him work for two days at NeueHouse, a fancy shared workspace.
His materials are mostly just like thin smoke and water vapor, and what happens changes depending on how big the place is and how warm or cool it is. The area needs to be chilly and a bit wet, and there shouldn’t be any air moving around. Smilde makes a wall of water vapor using a sprayer like the one you might use for watering indoor plants. After that, a machine sends out a burst of fake fog to mix with it. He prefers to keep the clouds under six feet so they stick together longer. “I really like my clouds concentrated, with a lot of texture,” he says.
The artist plays around with the formula for a few days until he thinks he’s made the perfect cloud. Sometimes, he makes about 100 clouds for one photoshoot.
The outcome is amazing, a fleeting piece of art captured just before it disappears. The simple, sometimes stark settings make the scene more dramatic. While Smilde creates his clouds, he has a photographer ready to take the perfect shot. He likes working with photographers who know how to shoot buildings well, so the materials like wood and metal are clear and sharp, standing out against the fluffy clouds. Smilde enjoys the fact that his creations only last a short time.
“I see them as temporary sculptures of almost nothing—the edge of materiality,” he says. “It looks like you can dive into them or grab them, but they just fall apart. There’s a duality that I really like where you’re trying to achieve this ideal thing that then collapses just moments later.”
If Smilde can understand the technical stuff, he wants to make clouds in the big Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. People from cloud computing firms in Silicon Valley have asked him to make sculptures at events, but he said no. To him, it’s not just a fancy trick.
“Clouds are quite universal,” he says. “Everyone can relate to them, but by putting them indoors you kind of change the context. It can become strange or even threatening. They can stand in for the divine, but also for misfortune.”