Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson

Audience participation: it's a phrase that strikes fear into the heart of the theatregoer. But in the realm of visual art, it has a happier connotation, implying not so much humiliation as increased engagement - and therefore amplified fun - for everyone.

Olafur Eliasson, a 42-year-old artist based in Germany, creates immersive environments that viewers can't help but interact with. His mid-career show, Take Your Time, was organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has toured to New York, Dallas and Chicago. It opens at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art in December and promises to be the summer's blockbuster art event.

Imagine a circular room ten metres in diameter illuminated by a soft purple light that imperceptibly shifts through the colour spectrum until it's bright yellow. Or a two-storey wall covered in moss. Or a sparkling white metropolis made from Lego that you and your kids are invited to help build. Or a magical, kaleidoscopic tunnel that refracts a rainbow of colours as you walk through it.

These are highlights of a show that MCA curator Rachel Kent says has "wonderful visual appeal. You enter each work physically; you're surrounded by it and they involve all the senses. It's a pleasurable experience on all levels."

Eliasson, an Iceland-raised Dane, operates out of a massive Berlin studio where he employs about 30 people: art historians, architects, engineers and builders. Here he masterminds large-scale works that have included artificial waterfalls in New York City and the famous 'Weather Project' in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London - a mammoth optical illusion involving a giant glowing ‘sun', machines spraying fine mist into the cavernous space, and a vast mirror on the ceiling reflecting the presence of the viewers below. 'The Weather Project' attracted a reported two million visitors to the Tate in 2003.

Take Your Time promises to be an ideal follow-up the MCA's crowd-pleaser Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years. And you can analyse Eliasson's work as much as you like as being influenced by minimalism or the Californian Light and Space movement, but the bottom line is that this is a show that anyone can dig. "I've always been proud of being a mainstream artist," Eliasson told Glen Helfand of ARTINFO.com. "I have no interest in being avant garde if that means I'm on the outskirts of society."

Kent says that another highlight of the show is a 1993 piece called ‘Beauty'. "You enter a dark space and in the middle is a sheer, very delicate curtain of water, like a drizzle, that is so delicate it shimmers like silk. Lights shone onto the water create an incredible optical effect that is essentially a rainbow."

Erecting the ‘Moss Wall', meanwhile, has involved a team of volunteers hand-stuffing a chicken-wire frame with Nordic moss over a one-month period. The natural world, Kent says, is one of Eliasson's inspirations, together with mathematics, geometry, and colour theory. "But underlying all these concerns is a strong interest in the viewer's experience - in ways of shifting their perceptions."

"In my view, our senses have been manipulated during the past hundred years so that we believe the world is organised in a certain way," Eliasson said to Helfand. "Ideally we would see things more individually ... but our senses are not natural. They are culturally produced." Nick Dent