The Nature of Things

Sophie Barber, Shiraz Bayjoo, Gareth Cadwallader, Exodus Crooks, Martyn Cross, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Andy Holden, Serena Korda, Mark Leckey, Robin Mason, Vivien McDermid, Karen McLean, Victor Seaward, Holly Stevenson, Jonathan Trayte, Emma Talbot, Georg Wilson, Dominic Watson, Lian Zhang

In The Nature of Things, curated by artist Jane Hayes Greenwood, works by 19 artists explore the thingliness of nature and the nature of things. The show cultivates a network of connections between works that are created in a world where AI supports cultural production, plant intelligence has gained wider recognition and the boundaries between human and non-human entities are increasingly blurred.

The works speak of personal experiences, touch on ecology, ancient and indigenous knowledge and explore our complex relationship with the vegetal world, telling stories of displacement, violence, extraction and consumption. The Nature of Things draws a connection between contemporary perceptions of the natural world and ancient animistic worldviews, set against a backdrop of climate emergency. The exhibition underscores a renewed engagement with the (un)natural world.

Exodus Crooks’ work, Y: the symbol of man (2023), brings together a series of naturally formed Y-shaped tree branches, each presented in a different guise. The installation includes a fully functioning slingshot made under the guidance of their mentor and friend, Philip Ambokele Henry, using rubber, leather and a branch from Port Antonio, Jamaica. In a connected film work by Crooks (not included in the exhibition), Ambokele personifies the slingshot, representing it as a symbol of man. Through the installation, Crooks alludes to the Y chromosome, a biological marker of male identity, whilst also considering broader reflections on humanity and navigating the complex nature of gender discourse.

In Martyn Cross’ painting Earmcearig (2023), a title that translates from Old English to mean “wretched”, an anthropomorphic landscape seems to embody forces beyond our control. The painting’s ambiguity leaves us uncertain if the partially visible figure is separate and aggressively advancing towards us or if they are part of a landscape that is on the verge of consuming itself producing a tension around domination and vulnerability. 

Serena Korda’s She’s a Messy Eater plays with the traditions of Dutch Still Life whilst continuing the artist’s interrogation of female archetypes, rethinking ‘herstories’ through a feminist lens. A delicately rendered arm hangs limp whilst its reflection displays the cross-sectional illustration of its innards, fleshy and meaty like a drawing from Mrs Beeton’s ‘Everyday Cookery’. There is a dark humour in this work that speaks of horror movies, memento mori and the uncanny.

In Dominic Watson’s God Bless Strawberry Jam No.3 (2023), a head weeps putrefying cider through the taps which replace its eyes. The work references fountains found in English country gardens and subverts traditional notions of beauty and tranquillity, instead speaking of a decadence that descends into the grotesque. Watson’s delirious sculpture speaks of the hidden rot that often exists behind facades and locates the inevitable traumas that result from greed, power and excess.

In Vivien McDermid’s painting, Storm Pot (2024), a mysterious yet familiar artefact glows within a dark landscape, positioned beside a mystical night rainbow. This enigmatic object, bathed in ethereal light, seems to bridge the realms of the known and the unknown. McDermid likens the act of painting to an excavation, an uncovering of something that has been submerged or forgotten. She describes the process as being like “a kind of excavation or an unburying of something lost”. Through this work, McDermid explores the interior worlds of objects, revealing their poetic and metaphysical dimensions.

Karen McLean’s baby quilt, No Pickney for Massa (2023), was begun by the artist during a Gees Bend Quilting workshop in Mississippi. The work was completed by famous quilt maker, Mary Ann Pettway. It features hand-printed plant imagery that on first encounter, is attractive and benign. The fabric’s design however, stems from the artist’s research into plants used as abortifacients by enslaved women under colonial rule, whose motivation was rooted in a heart breaking necessity to protect their unborn children from the harrowing fate of being born into slavery.

Lian Zhang’s painting Red Ochre Mountains (2024), references Taoist culture where feathered beings symbolise freedom and immortality. The work features four blindfolded bird-women that sit on anthropomorphic stumps, where decaying wood continues to blossom. These humanoid creatures seem to engage in a silent discourse, unable to connect with each other due to their mutual blindness. The work interweaves allusions to personal memories and imagined landscapes where figures, objects and animals fluidly transition. By drawing on elements of her migrant experience, Zhang’s work reveals a tension between natural cycles and the complex experience of navigating diverse cultural landscapes. 

Georg Wilson’s works follow the seasons. Her painting Full of Growing (2024), inspired by the iridescence of the Rose Chafer beetle found across the UK in summer, encapsulates the verdant richness and bright greens of the season, symbolising the end of a life cycle before autumn. In the painting, gemstone-like beetles crawl along the foliage and ground, alongside a non-human animal that merges with its environment, tendrils emerging from its eyelids and mouth. Wilson’s work explores ecology and presents imagined landscapes filled with genderless creatures that defy classification and reject anthropocentric hierarchies.

Victor Seaward’s, Vanitas VI (2022), draws inspiration from 17th century Dutch allegorical Still Life painting and the Wunderkammer, 16th century proto-museums curated by the aristocracy to display natural and cultural curiosities. This cabinet features primarily technologically manufactured objects: a 3D-printed red coral, a classic Wunderkammer motif is accompanied by items made from real-world scans, converted into data and printed in full colour on a gypsum substrate. Seaward refers to these as “physical deepfakes”. The cabinet’s composition is completed by a genuine blackbird nest.

Andy Holden’s totemic plaster sculpture Anatomy of Melancholy (2024)  sees a return to a series of works shown as part of Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time in 2011. Holden revisits these works in a more muted, dolorous palette. The accreted plaster layers search upwards in a wrestle with gravity, with the works loosely resembling stalagmites that reveal the cumulative process by which they were formed. They simultaneously suggest archeological depth, geological time, eroded cairns, tombstones and layers of sedimented memory. Through their ‘thingness’ they attempt to make visible a hidden quality of objects that human access and language work to obscure.

Whilst Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage has become a popular and Instagramable pilgrimage site, Sophie Barber’s painting, In Dereks garden dungeness (2023), straddles the irony of this type of cultural signalling with a sincerity that speaks of the magic and importance of this site. Growing up and continuing to live on the Kent coast, the artist visited Dungeness with her father as a child to birdwatch and walk the family dog. Barber’s paintings are both tender and humorous, carrying the weight of her personal history along with a multitude of meanings shaped by culture.

Jane Hayes Greenwood identifies with the sentiment in William Blake’s descriptions of seeing the world with a double vision. For Hayes Greenwood, things in the world speak of experiences past and present, giving shape to conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings. Her painting The Lament (2023), exudes a dreamlike quality, featuring an anthropomorphic, otherworldly plant in a psychedelic setting. Watery tears leak from an opening in the plant’s soft green body. The work addresses themes of birth, death, grief and renewal. A second work, Model 1  toys with trompe l’oeil, referencing diagrammatic models used to teach biology. Here the botanical is combined with the anatomical, with plant roots enmeshed and intertwined with organ-like structures. The painting reconsiders traditional understandings of biology, emphasising fluid boundaries, weird networks and the complex interactions within (un)natural systems.

Jonathan Trayte’s work is heavily informed by the natural world. Using castings and facsimiles, he examines the ways in which we perceive and utilise global resources and environments. Using an extensive range of methods and technical processes, Trayte’s work explores the psychology of desire through surface, material, light and colour. Glossy synthetic skins of paint give the work a colourful pop status, a chameleon appearance and an almost edible quality. His work, Winter Blush (2024) a functional lamp resembles a seductive, surreal, totemic plant, exploiting the language of design.

Robin Mason’s, Life Jacket after Colmar (1996-97), references a profound childhood experience in which the artist nearly drowned whilst wearing a life jacket similar to the one depicted in the painting. Part of a series inspired by Mason’s visit to Colmar to view Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), the painting features a punctured buoyancy aid set in a cartoon-like beach environment. The life-vest, tied and restrained, impaled with wooden sticks and wounded like Christ’s body, assumes a quasi-human presence and explores the interplay between vulnerability and safety, protection and peril.

Shiraz Bayjoo’s work, Botanical Miniatures (2024), responds to plant specimens held in the archives at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh. The work exposes how the histories of plants are entangled with our own and tells stories of colonial violence in which vast numbers of plants, along with human beings, animals, and soil, were transported on the ships that crossed the oceans as part of the colonial project.

Gareth Cadwallader’s painting, Unswept Floor (2019) transcribes a 2nd century Roman mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon that depicts floor-strewn detritus after a big feast. Cadwallader’s autobiographical trompe l’oeil painting presents beautifully and meticulously painted waste from a period of convalescence following an injury. Among the objects are bits of food, pills, plants, tissues, snail shells and a hospital gown, that take on a transcendental quality and speak of the emotional relevance and meanings we bestow on objects.

Holly Stevenson’s low-heeled ceramic shoes (2023/4) grow flowers, sprout mushrooms, wear human features and produce tentacles that prod and poke. Utilising a symbolic language, these works take on a Disney-like animation where cartoonish forms serve as a gateway to the feminine unconscious, with the line between the animate and inanimate, the real and the imagined becoming intriguingly blurred.