eARTh

There's a lot of pretentious waffling going on at the Royal Academy's new exhibition, eARTh - which looks at contemporary artists' responses to climate change; but there are enough stand-out pieces to hold your interest and stop you from drowning in the convoluted blurb - Namely...

Mona Hatoum's Hot Spot (above) which fizzes and hisses with rather frightening spite.

Cornelia Parker's Heart of Darkness, 2004, where she's strung up the charred remains of a forest fire in Florida - blackened bark, pine cones and twigs slowly twist and move in the breeze like an eerie, deathly, shadowy simulacrum of a living forest.

Darren Almond's Tide, 2008, which sees a wall full of perfectly synchronised digital clocks flip over in unison, minute by minute, like the tide. made me jump every time!

and lastly, Sophie Calle's North Pole, 2009, which shows the fruits of her labours after she went on a trip with Cape Farewell to Greenland to bury her mother's pearl necklace and diamond ring, along with a photo. as with so much of Sophie Calle's work, I found it incredibly moving - yet infused with wit (she talks about future ages discovering these items and dreaming up improbable theories as to how they got to be there).

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey

i was supposed to be going to a talk (an 'in conversation' type affair) on friday at the Siobhan Davies Dance studio about choreography, between Lavinia Greenlaw and the amazing Cornelia Parker. Sadly no one told me from the studio that neither speaker could in fact come, so i trekked to Elephant and Castle after work only to be stuck in a dance studio for 1hr 50 mins with two women who were never properly introduced, and so who i never knew the names of until i got home and googled them. quite frankly 1hr50 mins is a tough gig even if you know and love the speakers. by the time i left on friday i was about to gauge out my eyes. Still, the good thing that came out of it was that one of the speakers was Heather Ackroyd (the other was physicist-cum-murder novelist Leslie Forbes), who together with her partner (in every sense) Dan Harvey, makes art from growing things; pieces which explore time, progress and change... The beautiful image (above - it's huge by the way) is made from grass covered canvas, the artists having played with photosynthesis to get the shading. i love it. The duo have a piece in the upcoming RA show eARTh (opening at the beginning of December) which fascinated me months ago when i went to the press conference for the exhibition... it's a polar bear bone that has been carbonised and transformed into a diamond. the exhibition is about art in a changing climate and invites artists (including Sophie Calle and Cornelia Parker) to explore topics like climate change within their their work. definitely looking forward to it more than i was...