Soil: The World at Our Feet

Strange exhibition at Somerset House looking at the power and potential of soil.

The show was a mix of science and contemporary art but became a bit repetitive after a while. There are only so many videos of soil microbes a girl can watch.

The standout works for me were by Kim Norton “Soil Library” and “Kinship to Land”. In the first they take a small, standard amount of clay from different pieces of land and makes pinch pots from them and in the second they have asked people in Nunehead bury a piece of cloth in their garden to measure the health of the soil.

I also liked  Agnieszka Kurant’s sculptures made by taking an imprint of the inside of termite nests and Ken Griffiths “The Sweetmans - A Country Cottage Calendar, 1974” where he had taken a photograph of an elderly couple in their garden every month for a year.

Closed 13 April 2025


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