Grain & Grey
- Copenhagen
- Ida Krøyer
- Exhibitions
- 2026
The reservoir had been out of use since the nineteen-sixties and had never been lit. Four circular openings in its roof admitted daylight and rain in roughly equal measure, and the floor held two centimetres of standing water that we chose not to pump out.
The exhibition was arranged entirely around those four shafts of light. Eleven objects — three by the studio, eight by makers we had worked with over a decade — were set on plinths of stacked reclaimed brick, positioned so that each was fully lit for roughly ninety minutes a day and in near darkness for the rest. Visitors were given the timings at the door and told nothing else.
Nothing was labelled in the room. The reflection of each object in the standing water was, in most cases, the clearer view of it. There were no barriers and no invigilators; the objects were made of oak, granite, clay and iron, and were expected to survive being touched.
We had proposed a lighting scheme in the first week and abandoned it in the second. The exhibition ran for eighteen days and was closed on four of them by weather.
What we learned, and have used since, is how much a room can carry when the only variable is time of day. The objects did not change. The visit did.