A human take on nature's wonders

Two shows opened at Aberdeen Art Gallery last night, and both are concerned with the natural world and our re­la­tion­ship to it.

First come Dalziel + Scullion, with a long, en­gross­ing video work, Some Distance From The Sun, that traces the evolution of plant life over the millennia, from the primitive seaweeds to complex flowers. Botanical samples float across the screen against a stark white back­ground, shot in close up, so that any sense of scale slips away, turning the tiniest lichens into a forest of trees. The soun­dtrack­, by Glasgow musician Mark Vernon, gurgles, burbles and hums, an attempt to recreate the sounds of growth, of life itself.

Movement is key here. The slowly panning camera suggests both in­ex­or­able evol­u­tion­ary pro­gres­sion and the physical movement of plants, as fern fronds unfurl and seed pods pop. It's a simple piece, but one that it is easy to become lost in, absorbed by this careful present­a­tion of natural forms, which Dalziel + Scullion have not only doc­u­men­ted, but tran­s­formed, allowing the plants to tell the story of their own de­vel­op­ment.

In the next room is Unknown Pines, a suite of six prints, showing, in hyper-real detail, a short section of tree trunk. They are, tech­n­ic­ally, superb images - every last knot and crack stands out, a weeping ooze of sap glistens and the tiniest crenel­la­tion on a scrap of surface bark demands attention.

There is, if not quite a polemical edge to these works, then a political one. Dalziel + Scullion are ex­pli­citly at­tem­pt­ing to alter the way their audience engages with the natural world.

Each of the pines is labelled with its common name and its Latin clas­si­fic­a­tion, but in lavishing attention of their subjects, Dalziel + Scullion look past the col­lo­qui­al naming, the hi­er­ar­ch­ic­al sci­en­ti­f­ic ordering, the im­pos­i­tion of human ownership through naming, and focus on the trees them­selves. In effect, these works are portraits, and Dalziel + Scullion are - though I suspect they might take issue with the word - hu­man­ising the pines.

At this point, though, the duo are hoist by their own petard. Their aim is to do away with the casual, dis­mis­s­ive human view of nature and replace it with a closer, more personal ap­pre­ci­a­tion, but, in this near-fet­ish­ist­ic present­a­tion of natural forms, the pair have replaced sci­en­ti­f­ic ob­jec­ti­fic­a­tion with ob­jec­ti­fic­a­tion of another type. If human attitudes to nature are colonial, then Unknown Pines is a failed attempt to foster a post-colonial approach, ul­ti­m­ately casting the pines as noble savages - it is im­pos­s­ible, of course, to patronise a tree, but these works almost manage it.

In the second gallery, David Blyth, mounting his first, long-overdue solo show, also displays a fas­cin­a­tion with nature and its processes. His Knock­turne is a complex, multi-faceted in­stal­l­a­tion - one that fizzes with symbolism, subtly sug­gest­ing possible in­ter­pret­a­tions, only to counter them thanks to a slippery internal logic.

That logic rests on a seemingly illogical fusion of themes - the life of cosmonaut Valentina Ter­eshkova, and Blyth's stint working with a farmer during lambing season, a project that coincided with the birth of his first child. At the centre of the room is an ejector seat. It is being dragged along by 31 lambs, still-borns granted a new life of sorts, mounted and stuffed by Blyth. Cor­ral­ling this flock is a fence bearing spinning wheels bound up with telephone cords, and, on washing lines woven from twigs, sheepskin Babygros - or space­suits? - are hung out to dry.

Outsize balls of wool are peppered with needles, like organic Sputniks. On the wall, a silk parachute serves as the screen for a projected montage of footage from Ter­eshkova's flight, inter-cut with shots of a spinning wheel, a nod to the cosmonaut's unlikely career path, which began in a textile mill and ended in space.

Taken together, this is an almost over­whelm­ing array of allusion and reference. Birth and rebirth are central, and there is a whiff of sym­path­et­ic magic, as if the in­stal­l­a­tion is the apparatus for some arcane ritual to breathe life into the lambs and give Ter­eshkova a second chance to fly. But the tem­pta­tion to read Blyth's work as religious, with space flight analogous to communion with the heavens, is tempered by a bathetic descent into the domestic and quotidian - it is a work about lives lived on the farm, in the mills and at home. There is, too, a harder, pseudo- sci­en­ti­f­ic edge to the piece, in the matching of life cycles to cyclical orbits, and the fusion of high tech­no­lo­gy with low.

This confusion is Knock­turne's great strength. Standing before it, one can never quite grasp the whole, nor can one resolve the con­nec­tions between its disparate elements, but there remains a strong sense that res­ol­u­tion is possible, and that, given enough time, this is a work that will reveal itself.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 16th, 2007.