AFTER NATURE: curated by Ben Tufnell

Featuring internationally acclaimed artists such as Richard Long and David Nash, After Nature also includes work by overlooked pioneers and next generation talent, including Mercedes Balle, Chris Dury, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Alex Hartley, Magnus Hammick, Simon Hitchens, Tania Kovats, Alastair & Fleur Mackie, Onya McCausland, Nissa Nishikawa, Aimee Parrott, Lotte Scott and Fred Sorrell. The exhibition offers a timely exploration of the ways in which artists are looking at and thinking about nature in the twenty-first century, with works spanning a range of media, including sculpture, ceramics, drawing, painting and photography.

After Nature explores ways of making art 'after' nature, i.e. in imitation of natural forms and systems (but inevitably haunted by the idea of coming after nature too). One section focuses on artists using natural processes (gravity, evaporation, etc.) and materials (mud, minerals etc.) in their work, and a second focuses on artists working with visual perception (colour, form). 

Notable works include a significant mud work by Richard Long, a wall painting in ash and dust by Chris Drury, David Nash’s new pastel colour studies and Onya McCausland’s paintings made with ochre pigment reclaimed from mine waste. Tania Kovats’ The Last of My Summer Blooms, created with dahlias from her own garden, reflects on the cycles of nature and the passing of time, while also marking her transition into menopause. Alex Hartley’s The Houses reimagines modernist architecture through layered photographs and painterly interventions, blurring the line between natural and constructed, interior and exterior. Also on view are Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s works simulating the perspective of bees and other pollinators, and Nissa Nishikawa’s ceramics fired with materials sourced from the surrounding landscape. The exhibition further debuts new works by Magnus Hammick, Simon Hitchens, Aimee Parrott and Lotte Scott, alongside pieces by Mercedes Balle, Alastair & Fleur Mackie and Fred Sorrell.

While ecological and ecocritical discourse is ever more insistent that there is no distinction between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ (that to be human is ‘to be ecological’ in philosopher Timothy Morton’s words), extreme weather events are increasingly commonplace and the current US administration questions the reality of climate change and has announced an intention to double down on fossil fuel extraction. 

Artists have long addressed the complexities of these issues, often quietly and non-polemically, but with subtle power and insistence. By making work that addresses the ways we understand the human/nature dialectic and by interrogating the ways in which culture can represent and reflect the environment, art can perhaps offer a nuanced understanding of our present predicament. After Nature invites audiences to consider how contemporary art can offer new ways of seeing, sensing and engaging with the natural world at a time of urgent ecological change.