LONDON — Spotlit at midnight historic vaults of Somerset Home, Jo Pearl’s “Oddkin” (2024), a theater of delicate alien creatures that visualizes the microorganisms in wholesome earth, is dramatically interwoven with its personal shadows. Crafted from clay — essentially, a type of mud — Pearl’s work strives to assist us overcome our widespread squeamishness about soil, notably in cities, the place we choose it to be out of sight and out of thoughts. SOIL: The World at Our Toes makes an attempt to carry the pure materials again into view as one thing alive, important, and crucially, susceptible.
As Pearl’s set up suggests, soil is a extremely complicated mesh of plant matter, fungi, and micro organism working to recycle and regenerate the residing earth. On this time of ecological precarity, it’s no shock that the complexities of earth itself provide fertile floor for inventive investigation and experimentation. Within the exhibition, these vary from Tim Cockerill and Elze Hesse’s flower-like digital images of micro organism, to Herman de Vries’s extra analog grid of earth pigment samples, to Miranda Whall’s painstaking illustration of knowledge from a soil sensor community utilizing tiny pinpricks in paper.
Different works discover the emotional and cultural associations of soil, which has lengthy been a metaphor for residence and heritage. “The Flowers Stand Silently Witnessing” (2024), as an illustration, is a transferring movie work by Greek-Palestinian artist Theo Panagopoulos using archive footage of wildflowers in Palestine within the Nineteen Thirties, suggesting an entanglement of individuals and land that’s at present being erased. “I look at the past, unable to cope with the present,” the captions learn, “But the archive can’t hold my grief.”
Elsewhere, Annalee Davis’s work exhorts viewers to “unlearn the plantation,” drawing upon her experiences of residing and dealing on a former sugar plantation in Barbados, the place the earth is inextricably tied to extractive colonial violence.
Set up view of Theo Panagopoulos, “The Flowers Stand Silently Witnessing” (2024)
The exhibition hopes to drive residence the concept that soil is turning into depleted on a worldwide scale: Industrial farming and erosion are stripping it of its vitamins and ecological complexity, and consequently, the variability and abundance of life it could help. One of the crucial compelling shows within the present pairs two understated items by David Nash and Mike Perry. For “Sod Swap” (1983), Nash dug up a circle of turf from a Welsh area, during which a botanist counted 27 plant species, and planted it in a London park, the place they counted solely 3. Forty years on, the impact is reversed, with 39 species within the city grass and solely 4 within the rural turf. Progressive horticultural practices have made London parks extra biodiverse, whereas huge rural agricultural areas have misplaced selection by way of soil degradation, monoculture planting, and intensive livestock grazing. Perry subsequently inverts Nash’s challenge in “Reverse Sod Swap” (2024), inserting turf from a London park right into a Welsh area.
Whereas these works are all necessary, by the point I reached the tip of the exhibition, I felt there was a key omission — soil itself. The exhibition and its artworks are very clear, with soil typically represented by way of summary patterning, documentary images, or video screens. These are all reliable inventive technique of engagement with the subject, however there was an absence of alternative to get your palms soiled — even in creativeness. The visceral scent and really feel of earth have been disappointingly absent, in a approach that’s maybe stunning contemplating that the lead curators are each gardeners. The wild unruliness of soil may be difficult for dirt-wary city guests — but it surely may additionally immediate a extra pressing response.
Set up view of Annalee Davis, “Unlearn the Plantation” (2022–23)
Herman de Vries, “from earth: kreta” (1992)
Annalee Davis, “Saccharum officinarum and Queen Anne’s Lace” (2015)
SOIL: The World at Our Toes continues at Somerset Home (Strand, London, United Kingdom) by way of April 13. The exhibition was curated by Henrietta Courtauld, Bridget Elworthy, Might Rosenthal Sloan, and Claire Catterall.
