MARGATE, UK.- Turner Contemporary Project Space will present Nature is a Workshop - Selected from the Arts Council Collection, on view Thursday 28 February – Sunday 1 June 2008. Nature is a Workshop, the first exhibition in Turner Contemporary’s new Project Space on Margate High Street, presents contemporary artworks selected from the prestigious Arts Council Collection. The exhibition, also in Droit House on the Stone Pier, features works made over the past thirty years by some of the UK ’s leading artists in a range of media including sculpture, installation, photography and sound.

Artists have always recorded and responded to nature in their work, from the earliest painted depictions of landscape to Land Art of the 1960s and 70s, whilst highly topical subjects such as the recycling and reuse of materials have long been explored by contemporary artists in different ways. Coinciding with Margate’s contemporary art festival ‘Margate Rocks’ (3-11 May) on the theme of Art and Ecology, the artworks selected for Nature is a Workshop share a concern with our relationship to the environment, whether natural or manmade, and with those things that we collect or construct in an attempt to make sense of the world.

Richard Long has been working directly with nature since the 1960s, making maps, drawings, texts and sculptures based on his walks in the landscape, often using stones as markers of time or distance. His sculpture Fourteen Stones (1977) is one of the first stone circles that Long made for installation in a gallery and is made up of 61 stones gathered by the artist from a beach near the Bristol Channel , arranged in a circle on the ground. It is shown in Droit House alongside landscape photographer Jem Southam’s images of coastal erosion (Birling Gap, 2000) which document the slow erosion of materials over time along a stretch of coast near Beachy Head - the longest natural exposure of chalk cliffs in Europe .

In other works shown in the Turner Contemporary Project Space, materials are recycled or transformed as in Ian Dawson’s 171 Elements (1998): a large sculpture in which a tower of coloured plastic crates appears on the point of collapse, the result of intense heat which the artist has applied to these ubiquitous mass produced objects. Toby Ziegler’s sculptures combine the hi-tech with the handmade, as in Portrait of C.L (2006) – an oversized sculpture of a pineapple, made using computer aided drawings which were worked up by the artist into a three dimensional form of interlocking planes of plywood.

In the dystopian sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes, the central character Taylor lands on a planet which turns out be the earth in a post-human future, dashing his initial hopes of finding a new, improved world. Two sculptural installations in the exhibition appear to provide forms of shelter in potentially hostile environments. Cathy Prendergast’s Land (1990) is part tent, part landmass while Mike Nelson’s life-raft Taylor (1994), with its references to the aforementioned film, alludes to the possibility of survival on another planet.

Janice Kerbel’s recent radio play Nick Silver Can’t Sleep is a love story, narrated by the actor Rufus Sewell, about the impossibility of love between two botanically incompatible plant species and combines botanical research gathered by the artist with material gleaned from interviews with insomnia sufferers. Finally, the logical conclusion of this failure to propagate – extinction – is embodied in John Isaac’s arresting sculpture Dodo (1994).

The highly topical issues highlighted in this exhibition will be further explored in a series of associated events including talks, workshops and resources for schools.