ARTISTS TALKING

London Wildlife Trust, Dulwich
14-22 May

As an exhibition venue for ‘The Art of Permanence and Change’ curated by John Deller and Helen Morse Palmer, Sydenham Hill nature reserve has become a platform to challenge the perceptions and boundaries of traditional exhibition spaces, whilst also focusing on the ephemeral state inherent to performance, installation and time-based work.

The sense of transience implied by the title, which is also central to much of the work in the exhibition, echoes the history of the wood itself, a site maintained by London's Wildlife Trust that has survived 150 years of the surrounding area's social, economic and political shifts. In her piece The Ancient Order of Foresters Anna Pharoah draws on the historic significance of the site, appropriating the name of a society that gained in prominence during the nineteenth century. Hung from branches and not overtly visible, her work manifests as a series of wooden signs that play with symbols and the suggestion of hidden meaning. A bright green coat of arms, a rectangular piece of wood with a carving of a log on it; each sign appears to be the key to a piece of information or secret that may be buried deeper in the wood. Similarly, Deller also draws on the idea of park signage in his piece You are Here in Media Res. In a clearing in the wood he has placed signs facing varying directions. However, rather than provide the visitor with the type of general information usually found in public places, the signs are etchings on black and white plastic, depicting particular views from that location. Here the signs become permanent recordings of specific moments in the history of a space that is in constant flux.

Working with trees that have fallen or been cut down throughout the wood, Jane Thurley covers flat sawn surfaces of logs and tree stumps with pieces of floral-printed wallpaper inspired from traditional patterns. The wallpaper references those symbols of nature that are tied into an idea of Englishness and focuses on the production of natural spaces, ideas that run deep in Thurley's past works. Focusing on how nature becomes a type of construction in urban centres, the patches of wallpaper served to bring to a head the temporal, evolving environment of the nature reserve with Thurley's processed vision of the traditional English park space.

Other artists use the nature reserve to juxtapose elements of more conventional exhibition spaces with the outdoor environment, raising questions of narration, interpretation and methods of display. David Brinkworth’s Fine Art Service Industry takes a satirical approach, presenting the viewer with the artist patrolling the wood as a security guard in uniform. Any visitors that cross his path are asked if they are looking at the work meaningfully enough, or if they are wearing the proper attire to view the works of art. In another work, Magpie Seven draws on the notion of the archive as a source of documentation and creation of history, blending fact with fiction through an assembly of collected objects in The Peripatetic Museum of Curiosities. The museum collection, which includes a bottle of hope from Pandora’s Box and a piece of Jack the Giant Killer's Rope, is maintained and presented by a ‘custodian’ from a suitcase in the style of a travelling salesman.

At its most successful, the work of the twenty artists in the exhibition does exactly as the title suggests and toys with the notion of stability: history is reinterpreted into the present day, the natural world highlights the state of urban development and the only constant is the onslaught of change.

Ann Marie Pena

Ann Marie Peña