EARTH NOW

Artists Lillias August, Barbara Beyer, Neil Bousfield, Fran Crowe, Melvyn King and Alan Turnbull observing human impact on the Earth, Earth's revenge, and encouraging action and hope.

Lillias August has been studying and painting birds' nests in the collection of the National History Museum in Tring and has become fascinated by the inclusion of anthropogenic material. One, dating from the Boer War, shows pieces of bandage incorporated in the fabrication. Another new painting has been inspired by a newspaper story of a Ukrainian soldier finding a finch's nest lined with Russian fibre-optic drone cables.

Barbara Beyer is a German born, London based sculptor whose central themes are balance and precarity, human interference with the material world, landscape and environment. Her miniature ceramic houses and overloaded boats are precariously balanced; and the small sculptures of the Skywards series use small stones, string and wood off-cuts to play with notions of weight and lift, tension and balance, the beauty of arch and cantilever, line, volume and gravity.

The engraver Neil Bousfield has for many years been observing the erosion and encroachment by the sea of the east Norfolk coast near where he lives. No apologies for showing again his woodcuts, Winter Wave and Wave Upon the Sea Wall, illustrating the power and persistence of the North Sea. New this time is his multiple-block relief engraving, Miami Wave, which acknowledges similar forces on the other side of the Atlantic caused by the human impact on climate change.

Twenty years ago Fran Crowe collected 46,000 pieces of plastic over a year to ‘save a sqare mile of sea' and presented a stunningly beautiful, but disturbing, show at Landguard Fort. She continues to collect plastic, exhibit and campaign in her trenchant but humorous way, on the dangers of plastic fibres and the impact of fossil fuels on climate change. “All at sea” is a selection from her collection. A separate project, “Master Pieces”, is a set of satellite images of earth, beautiful from space, but actually some of the many sites of degradation (75%!) by humans.

Melvyn King has a ‘love/hate' relationship with abandoned quarries. As a painter, he is drawn, as others have been, “by the shapes and reflected colours, glowing brightly in what might otherwise be a landscape of muted greens and browns.” He concedes that they are the scars of man's insatiable need to extract minerals and are often dangerous and toxic for humans, but he has faith that over time they will undergo natural regeneration.

Alan Turnbull spends much of his time in his garden studio drawing blackbirds and blossom. His woodcuts, with the theme of regeneration and growth, were made specifically for this exhibition. His large print of a 500-year-old oak tree, rare in Yorkshire, which he has drawn, painted and made prints of over 25 years, is an attempt to express something of the permanence and beauty of that tree.