Ghostly white clay flowers; something that looks like a giant block of gold leaf dropped into the middle of a rural/industrial landscape of dirt roads and factory chimneys. The Earth exhibition at the Royal Academy in which artists consider the issue of climate change is full of beautiful images. This seems appropriate – if you think something is likely to disappear or change beyond all recognition you tend to look at it more closely. Who knows whether art like this will be a sort of memory bank for future generations?
Clare Twomey made the china clay flowers especially for this exhibition. Some are displayed in a cabinet, others have escaped and are growing along the room’s mantelpiece and skirting boards, anywhere they suspect may yield shelter and dampness. A few of the ‘wild’ flowers have been crushed, they are turning into dust and seeping into the RA’s cracks and crevices.
Like so much to do with climate change these flowers seem full of threats and possibilities we can’t yet understand or imagine. Crushed and apparently destroyed they represent the damage we inflict on nature but as they blossom all around the room they also take on a sinister, Day of the Triffids aura. If we do boil ourselves into extinction - as Mona Hatoum’s hot red neon map of the world suggests - some sort of vegetation will probably be the first to recover from the catastrophe.The flowers will have the last laughNature’s capacity to adapt and endure is the theme of David Nash’s four Ash Dome drawings. Nash’s Dome has its roots – literally – back in 1977 when he planted a ring of ash saplings in a Welsh valley. Over the years Nash has pruned and trained the trees and recorded their development in drawings he describes as the trees’ “fruit”. These four drawings are seasonal and show the trees’ transformation from a green summery dome, fizzing with pollen and sunlight to a gathering of bare, black trunks in the winter which reminded me of the witches’ song in Macbeth.
Roughly speaking the art works in this exhibition divide between those which record the environment around us – what looks like a block of gold leaf is an Edward Burtynsky photo of an oil sands processing plant in Canada – and those which take an idea or object and then imagine its environmental dimension.
French artist Sophie Calle took her late mother’s diamond ring and pearl necklace and buried them in an Arctic glacier. Her grandfather, fleeing the Nazis during the Second World War, had exchanged a house for the ring. As she photographs and writes about this latest chapter in the destiny of her mother’s inheritance Calle wonders if “in thousands of years, specialists in glaciology will find her ring and discuss endlessly this flash of diamond in Inuit culture. Or if a treasure hunter or beachcomber will discover it and exchange it for a house in the mountains of Grenoble”.
Calle’s work appeals because it tells a story and because it’s about equivalences – what equals what – and how these calculations change according to circumstances. In the upheaval of war a ring for a house might seem like a reasonable deal. If climate change really does transform the world portable wealth – rings on the fingers, knowledge in the head – may prove to be the most valuable asset of all.
Earth continues at the Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S until 31 January 2010.
Image: Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot 2006 David Roberts Collection, London
