LONDON.- The Horniman Museum and Gardens in South London has launched its new arts space, The Studio, with its inaugural exhibition, The Lore of the Land.
Exploring people’s deep-rooted relationship with plants, water and the natural world, The Lore of the Land is a multi-sensory exhibition, centred around five large-scale ceramic pieces by artist Serena Korda. Their bulbous organic forms incorporate plant matter from the Horniman’s 16-acre Gardens, and reference objects from the Horniman’s anthropology collection. These include composite, zoomorphic figures from India, also part of the exhibition.
Each ceramic work releases an individual scent, replicating essential oils distilled from plants in the Horniman’s Gardens, and complemented by a blended scent infusing the whole exhibition space. The ceramics, scents and accompanying soundscape together form Korda’s work, Sensitive Chaos.
The site-specific soundscape features music created from signals occurring in plants and trees. To create the soundscape, the Collective recorded fluctuations in electrical conductivity within plants and trees as they communed with them in the Horniman’s Gardens. Korda then passed the recordings through synthesizers, giving each plant a unique ‘voice’. This arrangement of plant signals was combined with recordings of African polyrhythms played on udu drums.
At the heart of Korda’s work is a desire to challenge an anthropocentric viewpoint and to encourage greater respect and appreciation for the natural world.
Challenging the purported dichotomy between science and spirituality, Korda bases her artistic and spiritual beliefs on research in the field of biophysics which suggests that plants, trees and fungi are sentient. The artist draws inspiration from scientists including Rupert Sheldrake, whose theory of ‘morphic resonance’ suggests that nature has inherent memory and telepathy-type connections. Korda is also influenced by the 19th-century Indian polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose, who pioneered devices to measure electrical activity in plants over 100 years ago.
The exhibition is completed with a display of 100 objects from the Horniman’s world class anthropology collection, chosen because they reflect people’s spiritual and cultural relationships with plants and water across different times and places. Objects on display include: a statue of Mami Wata, an African water deity; a dowsing stick, a device used to locate underground water; an udu drum also used as a water vessel; and an array of pipes, scent and incense holders from across the world.
A highlight of the exhibition is a rare volume of Anna Atkins’Photographs of British Algae (1843), the first ever photographically-illustrated book. Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was an English botanist who used cyanotypes for her work and is considered by some to be the first female photographer. For this exhibition, the Collective has created a series of cyanotypes of plants from the Horniman Gardens and other objects, using the same technique as Atkins.
The Lore of the Land marks the opening of The Studio, part of the Horniman’s far reaching anthropology redisplay project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which also included the opening of the critically-acclaimed World Gallery in June. Through co-curated exhibitions and events in The Studio – supported by Arts Council England, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in addition to the HLF – the Horniman aims to create a dialogue between social arts practice and its collections. The Lore of the Land will be accompanied by a series of live events, also co-curated by the Collective, beginning in February 2019.
Nick Merriman, Chief Executive of the Horniman Museum and Gardens, says: “The opening of The Studio, alongside an ongoing Learning and Engagement programme, completes our anthropology redisplay project that has been almost six years in the making. The Lore of the Land signals our commitment to social arts – it is both a new departure for the Horniman in how our exhibitions are created, and a consolidation of our work with community partners and collaboration with contemporary artists. I am delighted to welcome Serena Korda as our first commissioned artist in The Studio, and would like to thank the Collective for their time and dedication to creating this fascinating exhibition.”
The Studio’s second co-curated exhibition will open in autumn 2019, created by a new Collective and commissioned artist, to be announced shortly.
