Great Piece of Turf
31 January – 9 March 2003
www.daniellearnaud.com
Albrecht Dürer’s Das Grosse Rasenstück (normally translated as The Great Piece of Turf, but memorably labelled The Great Clod in a book I have on Dürer) of 1503 depicts in great detail a patch of weedy ground just a few inches across and is distinguished from contemporaneous depictions of nature by its intense, truthful vision. This is not foreground for a larger composition but itself and nothing more. No symbolic subtext is offered; just simple observation. Yet from such a virtuoso statement of fact something profound emerges.
This exhibition, which includes work by
Phil Coy, Dalziel + Scullion, Peter Dukes, Sophie Lascelles, Denis Masi,
Jasone Miranda-Bilbao, Kate Scrivener, Jem Southam, Finlay Taylor, and Sarah
Woodfine, takes Dürer’s clear-eyed observation of the natural world as its
starting point. However, as curator Finlay Taylor stresses, ‘dealing with
images and ideas of landscape and natural history at present, the works
cannot be divorced from current environmental issues, evolutionary concepts
and developments across the sciences.’ This, then, is an exhibition about
the contemporary contexts through which we observe nature and natural
history, and which define our attempts to describe what we see. It
demonstrates that ‘nature’ is a fluid concept – that no matter the range of
taxonomic, scientific, cartographic and artistic devices we bring to bear on
it, its meanings are elusive and personal.
Taylor’s own work exemplifies this approach. British Butterflies and Moths
(2002) is a specimen cabinet in which the insects are arranged artfully
rather than according to taxonomic principles. They sit in formations
against brightly coloured grounds. Freed from a taxonomic or entomological
context they become something other than objects for scientific enquiry;
beautiful and curious creatures, everyday yet extraordinary.
Phil Coy’s A Walk in the Park (2001) is a project that engages with the
digitalisation of the planet through satellite mapping. Coy offers a small
section of Central Park, in the form of a pile of twelve pixels, each a
metre or so across, each a slightly different but uniform shade of green. It
is in a sense the opposite of Dürer’s work; in this case ‘close’ observation
from space reduces the land to a set of featureless monochromes. Conversely,
Jem Southam’s Grange China, Isle of White (2002) is the most literal
contemporary take on The Great Piece of Turf. Like Dürer’s painting it is an
image of the micro made macro – weeds and mud made landscape – and like
Dürer, Southam focuses on an abject piece of earth rather than a cultivated
flowerbed or meadow.
Kate Scrivener also exploits shifts of scale. Small Plot of Land (2002) is a bonsai tree on a plinth beneath a Perspex cover. Each leaf has been painted white and then decorated with tiny texts that tell of freak weather: a 1lb hailstone that fell in Kansas, ‘glazed frost’, ‘giant snowballs’, catastrophic storms. This is a monstrous image of nature that has been miniaturised and contained. Two of her remarkable drawings are also in the show. These are delicate, intense images of jellyfish consisting of hundreds of tiny white and grey words telling stories of survival at sea, inscribed on sheets of black paper. The fragility of the jellyfish, and the ghostlike quality of the texts, perhaps evoke the speculative nature of human endeavour in the face of such vast natural forces as the sea.
In Sophie Lascelles’s Till (2003), a grainy black-and-white film loop depicts a black landscape beneath an ominous sky. A small figure hacks dementedly and repeatedly at the ground with a hoe. We are unable to see whether the figure is engaged in an act of furious vandalism or frantic cultivation. There is something disturbing about this perpetual loop: something absurd, helpless, manic and comical.
The paradoxical relationship with nature this film articulates is at the heart of this exhibition. We have studied, classified, tamed, ruined and polluted much of what surrounds us. Yet at the same time storms, floods and other natural forces remain beyond our control. This show suggests that 500 years after Dürer’s weedy clod, art still offers the best means of making sense of such things.
Ben Tufnell