Soil: the world at our feet
There are plenty of blockbuster exhibitions on in London at almost any time of the year, heavily promoted, busy, expensive. But on a visit last week I came across, thanks to being alered to it by a lovely review in The Observer, an almost hidden away exhibition in Somerset House on Soil.
I had a preconception that I’d be mucking around in something muddy and interactive and wondered if it would be quite small and a bit errr…. grey and dusty. Not at all! This has to rate as one of the more extraordinary and revelatory exhibitions I’ve been to in some time. Now I know someting about soil… or I think I do. After all I’ve been digging, growing, composting, mulching and generally enjoying the Muck in soils for decades. They can’t tell me anything new. But actually it opens up a whole set of new vistas and understandings of a subject that collectively I sense we both feel we know a lot about – after all we stand on the stuff a great deal of our lives, and often not so much – we don’t examine it all that closely, except when we do. So seeing it in a completely new context, an exhibition space, and presented in ways that definitely aren’t grey and dusty gives anyone, including Lord Muck, a completely new perspective.
Kicking things off are a series of photographs by Frances Bourely of creatures that live in the soil and contribute so much to it – dung beetles and the like, highly magnified, images somewhere between horror and surrealism. Jo Pearl has a wonderful collection of strange creatures hanging from wires, drifting in space, an installation she describes as ‘oddkin’, ‘…an attempt to overcome squeamishness and germophobia about soil’. So lovely, they look like someting from an unusual Christmas tree decoration box. And of course they are all fashioned from clay.
The exhibition is staged over several floors and this is put to good use for example in a wonderful set of photographs by Jim Richardson titled ‘Big Bluestem’ of the prarie plant. Basically its ‘just grass’ on the American Praries. But look underneath in the soil. No wonder the ‘Dust Bowl’ occurred. This grass, so unprepossessing on the surface has a rootscape documented over six lightbox panels (three more are above ground) stretchng down over four metres. No chance of being blown away or struggling in drought. Until ‘civilisation’ got to work. Some of the ideas are so simple; a series of what look like they could be photographs of distant planets turn out to be the result of soil interacting directly with moistened colour film, soil and chemicals producing dramatic multicoloured images.
Fungus gets a big shout out too. More stunning photography from Jo Pearl and even more extraordinary, a collective called Marshmallow Laser Feast who take us on a filmic underground journey to reveal the way fungi roots break down and recycle dead plant and animal matter. The network nourishes the mushrooms above ground which in turn shed their spores out into the air. Its no accident that the film is continuous – just like the ecological cycle it records.
Not everything about the soil is underground though. The utterly charming photographs by Ken Griffiths ‘A country cottage calendar 1974’, records in a dozen monthly shapshots the rebirth, growth, flowering, harvesting and return to dormancy of the garden of an elderly couple, the Sweetman’s across a year. It is touching not least because they aren’t recorded doing any actual gardening, but rather stand proudly in it just knowing what they and nature have created. More troubling is a film originally shot in the 1930s and 40s in what was then the Holy Land by a Scottish missionary seeking to record the flowers of this even then contested land. The original film – shot in colour, unusual for that time itself had lain unwatched for decades until it was restored and reframed as an elegy to something past and yet not forgotten. The beautuy of Palestine – mainly as far as I could tell shot around the Sea of Galilee, was obvious; lake, landscapes, flowers and the friends and family of the minister picnicing, walking, and examining and picking the flora in an unhurried and unselfconscious way – little realising the dystopian horrors of what was to follow. Locals got practially no look in – so some things never change – a point made in the remake. Despite its surface beauty a difficult and moving watch, and a different take on the meaning and significance of soil. And finally .. a chance to get hands dirty. Almost. A highly amusing installation, a kitchen where nature cooks up the soil. A tap drips onto limestone, the content of a fruit bowl rot, a mixer plays with river sediments. What a discovery ”Soil” is. And yet there it is, undeneath us every day. As the exhibition sub-title puts it, ‘A world at our feet’. A joy!
