Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Rooting, Ecology, Extinction and Environmental Emergencies
University of Edinburgh Library
Genre: Exhibition
Venue: University of Edinburgh Library
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
If you need a break from the Fringe, you could take refuge in a quiet, thought-provoking exhibition room of the University of Edinburgh’s library and see the show: Rooting, Ecology, Extinction and Environmental Emergencies. Exploring the idea of rooting, “searching, growth, beginnings and interconnectedness”, the show invites visitors “to consider entangled stories of art, history, nature and the University across time and art forms.”
Review
Focussing on the University of Edinburgh’s 350-year-old Art Collection, the works in this exhibition showcase the environment, ecology and its relationship with colonial history as well as the current climate crisis. In collaboration with the University’s Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability (SRS), thirty different artists that have been acquired by the University are featured in a compact show. It is locally based, showing the types of projects that the University of Edinburgh has done over the years, including paintings, textile pieces, paper works, natural materials, as well as video and photos.
Informative and illustrative of research, the works are most successful when appealing to the senses as well as the mind. A beautiful and yet slightly repulsive sepia tinted print, Caddisfy Larvae by Clarissa Gurd uses ink extracted from iron oxide from surrounding waters to make a print. Another etching, A Physical Geology by Diana Halperin makes use of sketchbook like collections of drawings, handwritten observations, reflections and journeys, connecting daily life with the environment.
In ca.1830-39, 100 cows were captured in oil paintings by William Shiels for scientific records. They were painted to find the link between the breed and its environment, an interesting example of how art was used for science. Unfortunately only one cow painting is on display at the show.
Some pieces in the show are more educational and informative. The University has recently purchased 431 hectares of land in Dumfries to protect the natural biospheres and create woodlands and a touch screen offers more information.
A project from the Isle of Skye made up of fabricated tile samples made up of crushed and compressed shells and mussels gathered from restaurants, resulted in beautifully made pastel tiles, which have been used to make community murals owned by both the University and the Ramsay Community Trust. Guilla Gentili’s piece includes limpet shells, oysters, mussel shells cast in colourful, attractive red and resin, metallic aluminum and pink transparent wax replicating the originals, make us question the relationship between art and nature.
Viewers are encouraged to take a hand-bound zine, The Green House Project (2020), by Francis Rogers on how to make your own “passive solar greenhouses”. Another project by Prof. Graham Stone involves packets of local seeds given to participants. No more packets remained in the show at the time of this review. Archival video and footage of a successful 1997 Greenpeace campaign to stop the British use of oil and drilling contracts is shown in a piece by Thomas Abercromby named Rocabarraigh.
This exhibition embraces a kind of self-institutional critique and the works reveal some of the paradoxes and human-centred activities and its impact on nature. In ”The Beast” by Ruth Ewan, an animated video, a dinosaur (Diplodocus Carnegli) is calling out an older gentlemen in a kilt for all the pollution he has caused. The man is Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1815-1919), the founder of the Museum of Natural History,
Another work, a portrait of entomologist, Eleanor Anne Ormerod, is a self-commissioned oil painting (1900) by an unknown artist, reflecting a complexity of the human relationship with nature. Described as “the protectress of agriculture and the fruits of the earth,” Ormerod ironically called for the extinction of the house sparrow and promoted Paris Green, an insecticide.
The show is quite dense and requires a lot of reading and patience as the panels of text are important in understanding the context of the objects on display. The dominant heavy, black tone painted on the walls and the weighted presentation remind us that this is still an institutional show. Many pieces have QR codes, inviting viewers to further investigate these projects, but what is somewhat missing was any critique of our relationship with technology, and our over reliance on energy overall.
The exhibition takes on an observational, rather than a didactic stance and seems to open up some questions rather than attempt to offer solutions. What role does art play in science? Can we truly be collaborators with nature, or are we part of nature? The exhibition shows us the myriad ways that we are bound and rooted in nature, how we are part of its destruction and yet how we can hopefully still play a role in protecting it.
