One of the earliest lessons we learn is not to mess with muck. Our parents tell us to leave it alone. The cycles of nature produce waste and we view those who get unnaturally fixated with it as morally arrested, deviant stick-in-the-muds. The idea of progressive civilisation mirrors this process of cultural purification. But some feel civilisation has gone wrong, and who better to remind us of our level grounding in the delicately balanced mess of nature than artists? Here are four British artists unashamed to go back to play with the primordial ooze.
Nick Rands is a mud-pie man. His installation Earthly Spheres is 4,000 balls of mud precisely arranged in a grid across the gallery carpet. Each is roughly the size of a cupped hand. This is base matter formed by the most basic of techniques. The mud balls have dried to various ochre, umber and sienna shades. Mud from the banks of a river in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil is seen to be slightly different in tone from mud from a roadworks in Reading, but it's basically the same whole-earth stuff anyway.
Stephen Turner pinned a roll of canvas to an estuary bed and let the tide paint its own mud-flat picture. The piece, now nailed to the gallery floor, is titled Channel, Chatham Dockyard, 21.7.96 ref. TQ 761696, Mapping the River Bed, Scale 1/1 with Nature. The liquid flow has been anchored with meticulous precision. The process has something in common with the traditional watercolour techniques of such 19th century British landscape visionaries as Turner and Cotman. But whereas their petrification of the organic was imbued throughout with glimpses of universal illumination, Stephen Turner's deliberately faces down into the murky shallows. Eileen Lawrence presents delicate totem-like images that appear as if they, too, are mere collections of natural detritus - broken eggs, feathers, dried grasses, twigs. Take a closer look and you see they're illusionistic watercolours that involve an objective attention to detail more often found in botanical illustration. Roger Ackling lets the light do the drawing for him, focusing the sun's rays through a lens so that grid-like patterns are burnt onto small rectangles of card.
In its desire to celebrate primal nature as a self-sufficient force, the work in Chart necessarily ends up impersonal, lacking the particularities, peculiarities and vicissitudes of human intervention. Its rather generalised vision of nature is somehow just too nice to really move anyone. What remains is the slight raw affront of letting the little things of nature's backwaters and wilds stand up for themselves. And who am I to argue it's not about time we gave them a chance?
