Thoughts on 'Natural Selection' by Andy Holden and Peter Holden

‘Shetland News: Ornithology inspired exhibition to roost in old AHS’

I’m very much looking forward to this acclaimed exhibition, coming the the Old Anderson High School in Lerwick, 26th January to 10th March 2019. For Natural Selection, Andy Holden has collaborated with his naturalist father Peter Holden to explore the connections between art and ornithology. Working across many mediums, Andy’s installation at the Old High School will in particular focus on the possible or impossible aspects of ‘artistic creativity’ in birds’ nest building, and also on the dangerous pursuit of egg collecting.

Above Image: Photograph of a Storm Petrel Wing (mine from 2016). I find the mysteries of the Storm Petrel fascinating - despite being no bigger than a sparrow, it migrates all the way to the south of Africa, somehow finding its way across land, sea and desert.

There is much that is miraculous and inexplicable in the natural world. How are the rock-face-like patterns on birds’ eggs made? How do birds make complex, and even decorative, nests without ever having seen another bird do it? Is it true that ‘the bird has a concept of beauty that precedes and governs his creation’? Are birds nests and even their eggs…expressive creations rather than just evolutionary imperative? In Holden’s installations made from bark, nests, branches and mud, described as ‘quasi-scientific’, we might perhaps start to see how artistic-imagination and scientific-imagination are more closely related than might be expected.

It is said that many scientific theories that are later proven were once imagined, or are similar to some things found in popular notions, tales or mythology. As evolved animals ourselves, there is much about our behaviour we cannot explain away or necessarily prove with science. Did humankind, as Pliny say, imitate the swallows when they made mud huts? It seems likely that to survive early humans would have worked with their understanding of nature, which they were part of, and was part of them.

Humankind’s relationship with nature has changed through the ages as civilisation has grown. One of the ways we can trace these changes is through looking at landscape art. In earlier Western art, landscapes mostly formed backgrounds to religious stories, a stage set for the painted human figures to act out scenes from the Bible. Only when people began to consider nature itself as a miraculous manifestation of God’s power did the landscape become the subject in art. There are complexities here however of the interplay of human-kind and God, or human-kind and cosmos, and especially in the Romantic era when the notion of ‘sublime’ emerged. Art expressing the sublime gave the viewer a taste of the ‘awful’ (in the original sense of the word) power of nature - but also seemed to speak of the power of man and his success in conquering and controlling such a force. As the Romantic movement grew across Europe, the Industrial Revolution was also gaining momentum.

Ruins often featured in Romantic art, and often in idealised visions with golden light bathing Gothic and grand ruins. These too almost seemed to reinforce ideas of the grandeur of human vision and endeavour, that even in ruination our constructions would be aesthetically pleasing and decoratively enhance the surrounding landscape. In landscape traditions through the ages have been questionable themes of pastoral escapism, idealism, and conservatism in the face of political or social upheaval. Today, at a time when much of nature is disappearing at an alarming rate, our relationship with landscape is hard to define. In the relentless growth of civilisation and commerce, some of the mysteries of nature will perhaps never be discovered before they’re lost forever.

Paintings from this sometimes troubled landscape tradition, by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Eric Ravilious and David Hockney, feature in Andy Holden’s three-screen video The Opposite of Time (2017). This video tells a social history of nest collecting, a pursuit which also highlights human’s often exploitative, sometimes even pathological, relationship with nature. Holden has previously showed this work in disused buildings, and will do so again here in Shetland at the now empty Anderson High School. This choice seems significant. After a building is left by humans - if it has become surplus to requirement, uneconomical, or out of date - the birds are one of the first to find their way in, nesting and leaving debris in a once orderly human space where nature was kept outside. But nature, with its mysterious imperative to always reclaim, soon takes over once again.

Further reading: Andy & Peter Holden’s ‘Natural Selection’: The Birdmen of Bedford

https://culturised.co.uk/2017/10/andy-peter-holdens-natural-selection-the-birdmen-of-bedford/

Artist Talk: Natural Selection by Andy Holden & Peter Holden, 7:00 pm Thu, 24 Jan 2019