The theme of this startling, enthralling and highly original exhibition is the stuff of life itself – our common ground, our source of food, our overlooked inheritance. For soil is all. Anyone who has put their foot on a spade to discover a treasury of pale potatoes in the deep, dark earth will know that it holds both nourishment and mystery.
It is the single most biodiverse habitat on the planet. Half of all our species exist underfoot. And what is going on down there is nothing less than a vast, teeming dance, a constant choreography of intimacy, regeneration and creation. Yet we scarcely know or see it. This show aims to make the darkness visible.
It starts at the very door, where the word “soil” is inscribed in its own substance across the plateglass entrance (miraculously, without protective covering) so that you see it, and you see through its fragility, all at once. Inside, the opening gallery is a beautiful cave of granular brown walls, subtly spotlit, as if you were eye to eye with the surface of Eden. The show then ascends through three levels, from deep underground through microscopic life forms, to the carapace above. It is stuffed with revelations.
Like the soil itself, you might say. Jo Pearl’s suspended morphology, multiplied in dancing shadows, of curious little forms – twisting spirals, feathery roots, tiny sculptural bodies – seems to be made of silk or cloth, but is in fact fashioned of the very clay of this earth. France Bourély’s staggering electron microscope photographs reveal what she calls the personality of tiny insects and the vast reaches of cellular nanospace. Jim Richardson’s Big Bluestem rises up through nine lightbox panels – only three of them the generally visible portion of this enormous prairie plant, stems streaming upwards like a shock of green hair. The other six are the tangled web nature weaves far below.
Soil is a museum of images, forms and relics, so many of them human. Here is an Iron Age sword, drawn, like some Arthurian legend, from the claggy clay of a blocked river channel in the Fens, which preserved it superbly for more than 2,000 years. But soil also makes its own exhibitions. A sequence of exquisite multicoloured planets running along one wall are the result of soil interacting directly with moistened colour film, helped along by artist Daro Montag.
What colour is soil? In painting, it is almost invariably dull brown. But it shows itself in an infinite variety of colours through the samples collected by Herman de Vries all over the world. Here he displays a wondrous array of hues from ochre to sepia to fiery red: the colours of ancient Crete, still there unchanged in the land and rubbed directly on to watercolour paper to represent themselves, without even the aid of a paintbrush.
Rich soil hums with microbial activity. You can hear it – literally – in the sound art of Michael Allen Z Prime, who has been recording the voltage potentials of the roots and stems of the peyote cactus for many years. His composition is something like a storm gathering, swirling, gently subsiding. This is the sound of the plant extracting water and nutrients from the ground and then exchanging them with deeply buried fungi.
The most spectacular work in the show concerns this secret labour. The artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast take us on a psychedelic film journey underground to reveal the astonishing role of fungi roots in breaking down and recycling dead plant and animal matter to enrich the soil. This flowing network twinkles like a highway by night, glowing with miraculous colours and sending up the life force into a mushroom above, which in turns sheds its spores out across the air – altering the world’s weather. Merlin Sheldrake’s commentary – about the wild intimacies of our coexistence with soil, how being is always being with, and so on – is pure poetry. And the film continues without cease in the most perfect ecological loop.
The art-science balance falters slightly with a sequence of conventional climate crisis videos. For what makes this show so unique is its particular focus on soil as a magical world beneath our feet in which we may play our part. Here you feel the influence of the wonderful Land Gardeners, urging all manner of ways to tend this great living biome. Live maps connect you with farmers all over the globe, using everything from brown sugar and cooked rice to improve microbial diversity. You hear the knowledgable conversation of gardeners everywhere; trace the growth of roses through time; watch an inspirational video of artist Asad Raza teaching his daughter how to make soil using only food scraps and dirt from the streets of Berlin.
And for sheer wit, Something & Son have created an entire kitchen to show how nature cooks up its soil. Taps drip on limestone, the fruitbowl rots, a Magimix whips up rivers of sediment.
You leave spurred to make something out of nothing: a handful of dirt, which now contains a world in your mind. Which may be why the most affecting works in Soil depict that human connection. Howard Sooley’s exquisitely pensive film of the gardens of Great Dixter attends to the workers as much as to the earth, passing through the seasons. And Ken Griffiths’s 12 photographs of an elderly couple outside their house, in 1974, shows a cottage garden growing out of the bare wintry earth to which it will return. Their pride and dignity are as much Griffiths’s subject as the land, and what it gives in return for their patient care. The soil has become, like the viewer, a silent witness.
Soil: The World at Our Feet is at Somerset House, London, until 13 April
