Land, Sea, Air. The primary entities on which we live, survive, or thrive. They are also lines of
defence and attack; military divisions used to demarcate territories, borders, and nations.
And yet the brilliant complexity of those intertwined elements defies and nullifies the human
impulse to carve things up, to partition, to divide and label. Seen through the right lens, land,
sea, and air become active symbols of the interconnectedness of all things.
Many of the land masses we live on today were once submerged beneath the waves, and many geological strata are made up of the compacted bodies of marine creatures, both strange and familiar, which swam in the oceans millennia ago. As the minerals on our shores dissolve into the seas, water evaporates to form airborne weather systems. Meanwhile, plants grow, bloom, and set seed in the soil under the life-giving eye of the sun, releasing the oxygen we need to breathe.
As human animals, our bodies are meeting points within this elemental mesh, conduits of
transformation from one form to another. As creatures of the earth, we eat the produce of
the soil, drink the ocean-born rains, and inhale the air into our lungs. We metamorphose these
bounties into liquid, solid, and gaseous forms of waste, releasing particles of ourselves into
our surroundings.
It is a balance that should be harmonious, but it is disrupted by the interference of capitalist-
industrialist forces, toxifying our waste on both minutely personal and wider societal
levels. We are living in an era defined by this (un)balance, perhaps down to a geological level
(as defined in notions of the Anthropocene). The natural systems among which we live are
both fragile and overwhelmingly powerful, just as the technologies we have created have the
potential to help and also to destroy us.
Working across a variety of media, the artists in Land, Sea, Air engage in these transformational crossing-points in different ways, with several artists using materials to draw out tensions between the natural and the industrial. Max Boyla’s elemental painting Thunder Only Happens When It’s Raining evokes both sea and sky, like a broiling mass of water and wind. Boyla achieves his characteristic textual effects by painting onto satin, a highly processed fabric usually made from a blend of organic, semi-synthetic, and synthetic materials such as cotton, viscose, and polyester. His paintings indicate how the petroleum industry and its products are interwoven throughout our society, in which ecological practices are inextricable from petrochemical capitalism and some of its supposedly green “alternatives”. The glossy satin absorbs paint, creating a shiny finish which jostles with the complex atmospheric effects evoked in the abstract image. The painting is riven in two by a vertical detail suggesting a lightning strike, inverted horizon line, or fissure. Through these visual devices, Boyla evades precisely defining the image, opening it up to imagination and emotion.
Kavitha Balasingham similarly brings out a fruitful tension between organic and synthetic
through her playful, whimsical, and poetic work. Her sculptural depiction of a flower for Land,
Sea, Air glows with a childlike, cartoonish sensibility, nostalgic and strange in equal measure.
Balasingham explores notions of being rooted in the earth beneath one’s feet as a means of
achieving a sense of belonging, even while grappling with otherness. Her installations often
either literally or figuratively transport soil into the gallery space, suggesting processes of
displacement and home-making through, with, and by the earth.
Coming at this idea from a different angle, the territorialised body makes its way into Carolina
Aguirre’s semi-abstracted paintings, in which she makes use of natural pigments to explore
the relationship between immigrant identity and land. Her paintings hint at human bodies and
faces through a complex visual language of presence and absence. Suggesting the interconnectivity of body, identity, and place, they simultaneously resemble the contours of land scapes seen from above. Intimate and estranged, a view of a homeland accessed through a plane window or phone screen.
Shaan Bevan began making large-scaled, detailed drawings of the sea when she was undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, during which time she had so many chemicals in her body that her urine was considered a biohazard; a paradoxically healing toxicity. Initially, these drawings offered both an escape from and representation of her interior physical and psychological turmoil, suggesting a porous fluidity between inner and outer geographies. Her recent works, including Tremble Wail for the Whales, are created using oxidised iron and gum arabic on wood, a medium that requires a quick, even frantic pace of work. Now mined from the earth, iron strata were originally formed underwater as a result of chemical reactions caused by the respiration of early cyanobacteria. These pieces express the artist’s interest in the emergence of land-based forms of life from the sea into an oxygenated atmosphere, an evolutionary development equally reliant on the chemical constitution of land, sea, and air.
Non-conventional art materials are also central to Sean Savage Ferrari’s practice, which utilises assemblage techniques to juxtapose found materials, from soil and leaves to discarded plastic and rubber. Savage Ferrari developed this way of working during the pandemic in Brazil, creating a body of sculptural assemblages that he left to dissolve back into the landscape from which they originated. This approach evolved through residencies in the UK, Europe, and South America. For Land, Sea, Air, he has crafted new works from his birthplace in South West England using wheat stems, which are dried, flattened, and arranged on rough-textured paper made from pulped grass clippings and framed with wood from discarded palettes.
In contrast to this compostable aesthetic, there is an air of the sleekly fantastical in Grace
Woodcock’s sculptures, in which she borrows tropes from science fiction to create hybrid
objects that hover between vegetal and animal, organic and synthetic, ancient and futuristic.
Ghost of itself (i and ii) are inspired by bizarre extremophile creatures recently discovered in
the abysses of the deep ocean, a reminder of how little we know about the beings with which
we share our planet. The sculpture is made up of two segmented wooden shapes encased
in fabric, stretched like a membrane across the joints of an alien body. The two pieces spiral
away from each other, imperfectly mirrored, ghostly reiterations.
The unknowability and mystery of the more-than-human world is a thematic thread that emerges throughout the exhibition, in which the artists repeatedly challenge viewers’ perceptions of ecologies and the positioning of human beings within environments. Connie Harrison does this by rejecting the tr ditional rules of landscape painting, eschewing the formal device of foreground, background, and horizon line in favour of a prismatic approach to composition that blossoms from a central point in the canvas. Blocks of highly textured colour fill the picture plane, dissolving in and out of abstraction, overflowing with life. Harrison’s paintings reject division and definition, instead embracing a sensual multiplicity in relation to the earth and its elements.
The exhibition is completed by an audio piece by Action Pyramid, which interprets the sounds
of photosynthesis by aquatic plants. Raw recordings are followed by a set of variations on
the plants’ theme, using different processing methods to interpret the sonic data. The piece
highlights the essential unknowability of the sounds, and yet at the same time emphasises
the importance of such empathetic interspecies acts of listening. Many of the aquatic plants
recorded by Action Pyramid, such as water lilies, inhabit a liminal world in which they are both rooted in the mud and free to float across the surface of the water, where they photosynthesize in the air. Taken both as living beings in their own right and as a metaphor for human experience, they defy the reductive idea that finding a sense of belonging on earth is to be static or unchanging. Land, Sea, Air is an expression of transformation and porosity, of the
slipperiness of the human animal in relation to its web of attendant ecologies, and of the power of that web to heal.
ABOUT ANNA SOUTER:
Anna Souter is a writer, researcher, and curator with an interest in the intersections between contemporary art and ecology. As an art critic and journalist, her work has been published by The Architectural Review, Burlington Contemporary, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and Resurgence & Ecologist, among others. Her curatorial projects include collaborations with
Omved Gardens, Roman Road, DATEAGLE ART, Lychee One, and RCA Critical Practice. She also writes fiction and has participated in research groups and residencies with Kone Foundation, Corridor8, Exposed Art Projects, and Artquest Peer Forum at Camden Art Centre.
