Origins of the Species

While often considered distinct, the natural sciences and the visual arts share similar fundamental processes: close observation and the gathering of samples, prompting original ideas through repeated experimentation. But where the sciences focus on the world around us, the arts often look within, examining not just our relationship to nature but also the very experience of being human. ‘Origins of the Species’ brings together five artists to explore where scientific disciplines and contemporary artistic practice overlap: Andy Harper, Liane Lang RA, Fantich & Young, Sol Bailey Barker, and Lesley Hilling.

Andy Harper’s paintings resemble botanical studies of exotic flora, where an organic sample has been removed from its context to be observed with analytical clarity. His paintings, however represent nothing in nature. They are instead pure painterly abstraction, arrangements of myriad different ways of making marks with oil paint embedded into frameworks to give them structure. The result is an invented version of nature that is purely man-made. The works thus explore one of the fundamental forces that drives the creative act: the creation of a new world, related to the one we live in but mediated and moulded entirely by the experience of the individual.

Liane Lang’s photography looks at the construction of history and the scientific document. The works here present a series of photographs printed onto geological samples. Much like the photograph, the geological sample has traditionally been understood as a slice of time, proof of a particular moment. Liane’s approach playfully picks this apart. Her figures are not always real but mannequins, dolls placed like ghosts in the perception of history. A finger poking a hole like a doubting Thomas underlines the theme of the uncertainty of proof. Liane’s bodies grapple with geological strata with an erotic energy that suggests the desire for knowledge is still desire nonetheless.

Fantich & Young’s unsettling sculptures explore the role of authority and violence in the formation of communal identity. Two masks here present alpha male and female headdresses like ethnological museum artefacts. The faces are hockey masks covered in dentures, the fans composed of military ribbons, all elements commemorating ritualised conflict and aggression. They are presented as an artefact from another society only ever so slightly removed from our own where a tolerance for violence has been built higher by gradual degrees. Echoes of fashion probe how menace and threat are also somehow attractive and seductive: that beneath all the pomp, pageantry and dress, something primal and vicious is at work.

Sol Bailey Barker’s practice uses sculpture as a means of reassessing and redressing the human’s relationship with the natural world, encouraging a return to a phenological existence in harmony with nature and its cycles. Totemic carvings of ash, redwood and oak bring archetypal forms from the unconscious to light, their shamanic shapes suggesting the endurance of the mythological as the accumulated wisdom of generations. Abstraction here is common culture, familiar forms and materials a way of deconstructing the detached position of the viewer. These works act as conduits for the individual to reconnect to the greater whole that is nature, fomenting a sense of empathy and belonging.

Lesley Hilling’s sculptures take a cartographic approach to the soul, recognising how life is lived through objects and that a person’s belongings tell the tale of their days. Her works are made from the discarded detritus of everyday existence: old furniture, toys and gears, photographs and magazine clippings, all deconstructed and re-assembled in compositions like maps of imaginary cities. The works are lyrical, echoing Mondrian’s New York paintings and Joseph Cornell’s poetical assemblage boxes. In contrast to our increasingly virtual existence, Lesley places value on the physical traces of life, through sculptures that suggest how the objects we live with connect an individual’s inner world with the physical world without.