[This article was originally published in UEA’s student newspaper, Concrete.]
The Sainsbury Centre’s latest addition to its Planet For Our Future season, ‘Sediment Spirit: The Activation of Art in the Anthropocene’, has opened to the public, taking a modern, interactive approach to the conversation surrounding climate change. With artworks spanning the 1960s to the present day, Sediment Spirit ‘urgently addresses the impacts of human-made climate change’ including ‘geological matter, from minerals, rocks, plants and animals (sediment), and the intangible spiritual quality of arts and material cultures (spirit)’. Curated by John Kenneth Paranada, the first Curator of Art and Climate Change at a UK museum, this exhibition combines local and international artworks which respond to the climate crisis and all its complexities.
The exhibition considers the effects of climate change from all angles, with the Planet For Our Future programme as a whole employing a low-carbon strategy in order to produce the least amount of waste possible from an exhibition. The Sainsbury Centre have also pledged to ensure all products made for Sediment Spirit are reused and recycled, emphasising the role galleries and museums have to play in helping create a sustainable future.
What stood out to me about Sediment Spirit was its preoccupation with making art as accessible and interactive as possible. The exhibition uses multiple interactive artworks made by artist Henry Driver in his ‘Secrets of Soil’ series. This artwork uses a multitude of screens, as well as one linked to an Xbox controller to trace the life of microscopic beings and the microbiology of soil. Viewers are able to watch in real time the vital role ecosystems play in sustaining the earth, enabling vegetation to grow. I found myself absorbed in the interactive game, watching the cascade of bright colours across the screen which you could pan in and out of with the Xbox controller. This addition will be great for children and is a perfect way of combining new technology with scientific research.
Aside from the more interactive artworks, there are a number of sculptures and paintings which explore the themes of human interference and consumption. The first pieces that caught my eye when visiting were Salvador Arancio’s ceramic sculptures which explore ‘the unseen and the unknown’. One of my favourite pieces by Arancio, Leafy Hands, depicts two hands – one holding what looks to be a stack of leaves but could equally be a hand holding a stack of man-made rubbish which has moulded together to appear as leaves, and the other hand covered in leaves which have a marine-like quality to them, as if the hand was formed from the depths of the ocean.
Another artist’s work which particularly stood out to me was Anj Smith’s Desert Epochs (2014), a painting depicting ‘the state of environmental deterioration in the natural world’ shaping ‘awareness of the transformation of landscapes’. I liked the idea of nature being ‘a character not to be conquered but to be seen, respected and conversed with’. This ties in with the Sainsbury Centre’s message about art being alive, a living creature which we need to interact with. In their Living Art – East End Display, the same concept is employed, whereby visitors can walk inside a glass display case and experience embodying the art themselves.
There are also plenty of short films to watch within the exhibition, from the Karrabing Film Collective’s The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (2018) which criticises the poisonous effects of capitalism on the environment and community, to Shireen Seno’s To Pick a Flower which uses photographs from the ‘American occupation of the Philippines’ (1898-1946) to discuss how capitalism and colonialism have been long term drivers of climate change, exploiting natural resources for personal gain.
These are some but not all of the incredible artworks on display, so if you’re on campus or in the Norwich area, I would thoroughly recommend visiting the exhibition yourself. If you’re keen to visit another exhibition which similarly discusses climate change and the role we play in our planet’s future, check out the Sainsbury Centre’s The Stuff of Life | The Life of Stuff.
Sediment Spirit is on display at the Sainsbury Centre now until 31 March 2024.
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