Intricate Constructions

Natural Selection by Andy Holden and Peter Holden

There is still about a month left to see ‘Natural Selection’ by Andy Holden and Peter Holden here in Shetland at the Old Anderson High School.

It’s a fascinating visit, and the dis-used school is an eerie setting for the exhibition. Andy and Peter’s works inhabit rooms that are like so many educational buildings all across the country - all lino floors, serving hatches and 1960s architecture. The scholastic also runs through the video works and installations on show here, as we learn fascinating facts about birds, their behaviour and their creations. We also learn about how humans have searched for understanding of nature through collecting, study and observation - but have also often used less than scientific methods to speculate about nature and make sense of “cosmic confusion”. It seems we have often sought to possess nature, not only through obsessive and criminal activities such as egg collecting, but also to obtain a kind of possession-through-knowledge, as histories of 19th century aristocratic “gentleman scientists” reveal.

Themes of the uncanny continue in many aspects of the exhibition - it is not only the school rooms that are eerily alien-yet-familiar. We see footage of birds constructing astounding nests which remind us of human primitive houses, but conversely an installation of an egg collectors illegal hoard of rare birds’ eggs is in fact entirely made from hand-painted replicas.

Andy Holden speaks about the perfectly designed and also beguiling shape of a guillemot’s egg, balanced and weighted to prevent it easily rolling off cliff edges. But this whole exhibition is also beguiling. Father and son enlighten us with so many natural wonders and intricate natural forms to marvel over, whilst also drawing attention to the dangers of coveting nature so much that we threaten to destroy it.