Terra Infirma by Natalie Taylor: Visual Heritage and Critical Context

Text by Lucy Byford

Terra Infirma brings together a long-running project with several intersecting strands. As John Muir fellow for the period encompassing the global climate summit COP26, artist Natalie Taylor took part in the ‘Pilgrimage for COP26’, which wove together the ways of John Muir and St. Ninian. Taylor crafted the Keepers of the Soils cape for the occasion of both the pilgrimage and other community events in Dunbar. Taylor’s hand-stitched garment, coloured using natural dyes, is both a ceremonial and an artistic object, activating new behaviours to transform its wearer and open up new ways of communing and interfacing with the land. As the cape is passed around to spotlight different voices, the ‘keeper’ is an inherently non-static and transferable role. The rotation and subsequent proliferation of the keeper evokes the idea of a ‘social sculpture’, a term coined by Fluxus and environmental art figurehead, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). Beuys was himself greatly influenced by Scotland’s Celtic heritage in his art and environmental activism, exhibiting shaggy peatland turf in his piece Loch Awe (1970).^[1] A social sculpture is a visionary conception of a post-capitalist society in which ‘everyone is an artist’ because the figure of the artist has been reintegrated into society, entrusted with social acts of creation, ceremony and teaching.^[2] One such act was Beuys’ urban forestation piece, 7000 Oaks (1982), which saw volunteers carry out a mass planting initiative over five years. The Keepers’ cape was similarly donned by community gardeners and farmers in Dunbar, whose photographic portraits are exhibited in the Dunbar Town House, but also on the walls of The Ridge, a social enterprise using collaborative gardening as a tool to empower individuals battling addiction and poor mental health.

The cape is also a lab coat of sorts, fitted out with breast pockets for collecting soil samples from significant sites along the route of the pilgrimage. Half a century ago, Beuys suggested  that the roles of artist and researcher were progressively fusing. He was responding to a sea change in contemporary art movements, where ‘research and experiment … replaced form as the guiding force’.^[3] But while Beuys’ investigations centred on epistemology and pedagogy, Taylor spent the latter part of the fellowship conducting research in a range of laboratories, such as the Hutton Institute, and the open-access ASCUS laboratory for artists at Summerhall in Edinburgh. In the ASCUS lab in particular, Taylor used microscopy to make the acquaintance of springtails, nematodes and other soil-dwelling organisms. Although unfamiliar, nematodes account for an estimated four fifths of all animal biomass, meaning we rely on them for our food.^[4] During the Scientific Revolution, Robert Hooke’s landmark publication, Micrographia (1665), presented awe-striking images of a previously unseen world, painstakingly observed from the lenses of the earliest microscopes. Taylor’s paintings of microfauna and the rhizosphere are similarly blown-up in scale, revealing complex interrelationships and exchanges between plant roots, microscopic creatures and soil nutrients.

Taylor developed a meta-practice for the project, grinding her own paints from soil to then visually represent the earth from a micro-vantage point. This has the effect of creating a palimpsest, where the medium used in each painting is also the painting’s subject. In 1991, British artist Marc Quinn also commented on materiality as subject in his piece entitled Self, a cast self-portrait comprising of ten frozen pints of the artist’s blood. By taking stock of how practices of care and rich biodiversity together underpin the fertility of soil, Taylor reclaims the symbolism of soil as a life-giving substance away from fascistic ideologies of blood and soil. German artist Anselm Kiefer reflects on these associations in his depictions of scarred, deadened fields, such as those seen in his painting Nürnberg (1982), providing a sombre counterpoint to Taylor’s practice of culturing communal abundance for all.

The microorganisms portrayed in the paintings are also embroidered onto the surface of the cape, a stitched diagram of the ‘soil food web’, left incomplete to reflect the eroded and depleted state of 30-40% of the world’s arable soil. Collaboratively sewn by women and girls over a series of workshops, the web of life motif on the cape recalls the spider web symbol used by the women at Greenham Common Peace camp from 1981 to signify the fragility of life faced with the threat of nuclear war.^[5] Another figurative web, Taylor’s own project spans scores of individuals, some of whose oral histories of the earth are displayed in the series For the Love of Soils: A People’s Collection. The communality of the project distinguishes Taylor’s work from the Land Art of Robert Smithson, or its legacy seen in the desert installations of James Turrell, where landscapes are moulded according to a sculptural-cum-architectural vision of the artist, sometimes to the detriment of local habitats. The fruits of Terra Infirma can instead be interpreted as part of a wider turn to more collective and non-hierarchical practices seen in contemporary art over the past few years. In 2019, all four nominees of the Turner prize pledged to split the award evenly amongst themselves as an act of solidarity, while in 2021, the prize was awarded to Array Collective with their carnivalesque event The Druithaib’s Ball, selected from a shortlist of nominees comprising exclusively of artists’ collectives.

Complementing the photographic series recording local histories of soil, the dinner service installation, Replenish my strength and I will feed you again, invites us to take a seat at a shared table, set with glasses filled with earth. The feminist artist Judy Chicago first used the conceit of a dining table in a contemporary art setting with her vast work, The Dinner Party (1979). In Chicago’s piece, yonic, biomorphic forms, each representing a significant woman in history, are served up on thirty-nine individual plates. At Taylor’s table, our limits and boundaries as beings are called into question. Fused onto newly fired plates are equally uncanny images of subterranean mycelial networks and decomposing hyphae, highways for nutrients to travel through soil and into crops and other flora. Like soil, the substance we are made of is also permeable and compound. Our lives hinge on symbiotic relationships forged between our body and the ecology of our microbiomes which are, in turn, influenced by the soil that produces our food. In highlighting these co-dependencies, Taylor raises issues explored in the trans-speciesism and posthumanism of ecofeminist and zoologist Donna Haraway. As Haraway writes in When Species Meet (2008),

[E]ver more complex life forms are the continual result of ever more intricate and multidirectional acts of association of and with other life forms. Trying to make a living, critters eat critters but can only partly digest one another. Quite a lot of indigestion … is the natural result, some of which is the vehicle for new sorts of complex patternings of ones and manys in entangled association.^[6]

A concurrently running exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, entitled Rooted Beings, also collates artistic responses to the ‘complex patternings’ of organic life, advancing an understanding of plants as ‘sensitive, complex and interconnected beings’, who play ‘active roles in ecosystems and human societies.’^[7] At a time when early studies have detected microplastics in human blood, and soil erosion and climate change pose increasing threats to the breadbaskets of the world, a greater understanding of the ways in which humans are implicated in and shaped by these complex systems could not be more timely. Terra Infirma examines anew a foundational element of life on earth, conveying Taylor’s conviction that the stewardship of soil is fundamentally a shared responsibility, or, in the words of the artist, “a shared mantel”.