Listening to the Earth brings together ten international artists who use the earth itself as material. It runs until 13 December.
Listening to the Earth, a group show of ten international artists, is on at the Drawing Room in Bermondsey until 13 December.
Curator Hammad Nasar describes it as a show about “working with the earth as subject but also directly as material”. The pieces push the idea of drawing well beyond the page, ranging from simple mark making to performance and recording.
At the centre of the main gallery hangs a seven-metre calico banner by the artist Mary Lemley. At dawn one morning in September, she lowered it on ropes into a dock east of Tower Bridge where the underground river Neckinger runs into the Thames, and left it there while the tide came in and went out again.
The cloth came back soaked in mud and streaked with red ochre from a seam of pigment sewn into its middle. It was not the first time it had been dipped there. In 1992 Lemley set out 14 large calico cloths at the points where 14 forgotten London rivers reach the Thames. The westernmost was Beverley Brook in Putney and the easternmost the Ravensbourne at Deptford Creek, 12 miles downstream. The Neckinger cloth has now been brought back into use for this exhibition, close to where that river once flowed.
The dock has a grim history. In the 18th century pirates were executed there, and old maps mark it as Devol’s Neckenger, a nod to a slang name for the noose.
The other works travel a long way from Bermondsey. Some look at Cornwall’s abandoned mines and sacred land, or at the mineral-rich coast of Ghana. Others turn to a cement plant in Pakistan and a slate mountain in North Wales. The places the artists chose are linked by how people use the land, whether for ritual and settlement or for work and extraction.
It runs at the Drawing Room in Bermondsey until 13 December.
Ten international artists, including Mary Lemley. The show is curated by Hammad Nasar.
In a dock east of Tower Bridge where the underground river Neckinger flows into the Thames.
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