The World Gardeners: SOIL

Photo by Grace Mahoney

When you hear the words ‘soil exhibition’ a general feeling of intrigue is bound to arise, add a dozen questions to this and you will just about arrive at the thoughts I was having before visiting this exhibition. It ran from the 23rd January to the 13th of April, with ticket prices varying but were £15 with a valid form of student ID. Somerset House gave guidance on how to arrive at the exhibition, a recommended two hour duration, and guidance for those travelling into central London by car. The exhibition was advertised as ‘a landmark exhibition unearthing the wonder of soil, its unbreakable bond to all life, and the vital role it plays in our planet's future’. The bold white letters at the entrance spelled out SOIL on a grainy background, representing the artistic endeavours surrounding this exhibition. 

Photo by Grace Mahoney

You were immediately invited into an experience of soil, with the use of sensory questions of how the soil felt beneath your feet under warm orange and red lighting. The tone for the first part of the exhibition was set as a grounding, immersive experience, where the soil represents a ‘level of sophistication that human engineers can only dream of’, creating a division between the natural world and human initiative. This isolation of the natural world builds an educational perspective, free from human intervention. What came to be a major theme, especially on the ground level of the exhibition, was the importance of the surfacing of what we cannot see, what is hidden from us but is nevertheless under our feet. The dark lighting with warm hues encourages you to enter an unseen level of soil in its most true and vulnerable state – immersing yourself in the microscopic level of it, its complexities, and the biological history that created soil in our contemporary space.

The exhibition was in its own right hugely diverse, moving from the micro to the macro, a set of three elements to soil was created. First, it began looking at the makeup of soil, then its microscopic reality and lastly, an immersive experience of the stages of soil and its effect on other living entities, split into three definitive sections across the exhibitory space. Drawing the exhibition to a close, there was an interactive map entitled ‘hope’, emphasising the presence, condition and realities of soil at a global scale. It also featured an interactive kitchen scene with kitchen utensils, equipment and cooking ingredients, representing an art piece centred around soil's inability to be replicated through human science. By bringing the idea of the creation of soil into a domesticated space of a kitchen rather than a laboratory or scientific space, the complex of recreating soil becomes identifiable on a unanimous level. The exhibition therefore does not present soil's place in contemporary science in an unrelatable lens, but ensures that visitors of the exhibition understand that the molecular makeup of soil is beyond our modern capabilities. 

Photo by Grace Mahoney

 It was the in-between position of this micro and macro representation, however, that I found most interesting. By separating the exhibition into sections and floors, you originally immersed yourself in microscopic images, but as you ascended the stairs, it was almost as if you were brought back to surface level, where the soil was used in the representations of art and life on an intimate scale. These rooms featured twenty pieces from artists across the globe, with curtained rooms and short films to auditory and visual representations of greenhouses. The exhibition’s use and intertwining of the senses worked incredibly effectively to bring its audience closer to the capacities of soil. 

One of the artists on display, Lauren Gault, believes that the conditions of soil are crucial in helping us ‘listen more sensitively to what the earth is telling us’, with her work presenting the importance of minerals in soil–not only for plant growth but for the health of animals. These artistic pieces looked beyond the microscopies of soil to extend to its importance and presence in all aspects of life. One of the most striking pieces in the exhibition was the piece entitled, ‘With horses’, created by Maeve Brennan in 2023. This short film was prefaced with a trigger warning of animal abuse, showing a horse and her baby foal, submerged in tonnes of rubbish: a newborn and a dying mother. Although not directly about soil, this element of the exhibition represented the advantage taken of the natural world, with the adjacent rooms centring around the surplus demand in the agro-industrial stock market. ‘With horses’ represented the consumerist cycle we create, perpetuated by our capacity and our reluctance to replenish; the idea that where there should have been a field, a space for this mother and her baby enriched with minerals. Gault outlined that this crucial part of animal life was instead replaced by waste. The films in the exhibition represented a politicised element that I expected before going to the exhibition, given the current ecological politics. However, on saying this, the exhibition did favour more towards the celebration of soil, what is hidden from us beneath it and what has been brought to the forefront of representation through artistic, social and innovative mediums. 

Overall, I enjoyed the exhibition, even beyond the amount I thought I would and recommend it for anyone looking for something slightly diverse, interested in ecology, or an appreciator of modern art forms and symbology. This exhibition moves beyond the static and comes to include something invigorating, sensory and interactive, suitable for any age. 

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Edited by Daria Slikker, London Editor