These circular artworks were created by specially designed drawing and painting machines installed in the desert near Doha during The curious desert, 2023, Eliasson’s exhibition at the National Museum of Qatar. Eliasson has been creating drawing machines since 1998, a project he began in collaboration with his father, Elias Hjörleifsson, who was an artist as well as a sailor and cook. Eliasson’s drawing machines use elements of chance and natural phenomena to create markings in ink, paint, or coloured pencils on circular sheets of paper or canvas.

The drawing machines conceived for Qatar were installed within circular pavilions that were open at the top to the sun and weather – forces of nature that were enlisted to create indexical portraits of a specific place at a specific time.

These drawings were made by a machine powered primarily by the sun and by the movement of the planet. Two rows of glass spheres of various sizes were supported on adjustable racks above a sheet of fireproof paper. The glass spheres acted as lenses to focus the sunlight into points of intense light that burned marks onto the pages. As the position of the sun in the sky changed in relation to the glass spheres, the light travelled across the paper, marking it over the course of the day. A motor beneath the table slowly rotated the paper, enhancing the motion of the earth and lengthening the resulting lines.