Among the Trees, Hayward Gallery review ★★★★☆ by Ifan Llewelyn
Living in a concrete jungle like London, you can go an entire afternoon without coming across a flicker of green. Especially heading into the tail end of winter, our world feels grey and drab. It isn’t until you leave the built-up urban centre for a breath of country air that you notice what you’ve been missing: trees. Yes, they’re dotted about on the Embankment and down the odd pavement, but these manicured, decorative shrubs don’t quite compare to the experience of walking among nature’s giants. This spring, the square concrete interior of the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre is transformed into a forest of art in Among the Trees, a meditation on our complicated relationship with this group of the earth’s oldest creatures.
Bringing together work from the past 50 years, this mixed-medium exhibition immediately immerses you in an undergrowth. Standing proud in the centre of the dimly-lit gallery space is Giuseppe Penone’s Tree of 12 Meters, 1980-82. These deep orange tree spines strike a compelling tone of defeated strength, with the artist whittling large industrial timber down to reveal the almost delicate organic form within the once-living tree. Working your way between Kirste Everberg’s paintings and intricate photographs of branch-networks, you find yourself gazing up to the clouded sky of Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
Spread across six large screens sways the colossal spruce from Ahtila’s native Finland in Horizontal – Vaakasuora, 2011. The video installation, pegged by the artist as a ‘portrait of a tree’, is undeniably majestic though directly gesturing to how futile our attempts to re-create the experience of standing in front of one of these giants. This sweeping piece is beautiful but is harshly split into segments by the black limits of the video screens.
Meandering into the exhibition’s third gallery, the work takes a historical turn. These works take a pause to consider our shared history with these organic beings, most poignantly summed up in Zoe Leonard’s photographs of trees growing through cracks and fences. Defiant, these trees manage to thrive in human-manufactured adversity. We’re reminded that over the past 12,000 years, the number of trees on this planet has declined by “almost 50%”. These pieces are in direct conversation to the contorted trees growing between the grey slabs on the Southbank just outside the gallery.
One compelling framing comes with the idea of trees as witnesses to human history. Though anthropocentric, it does weight how significant it is that these trees were around before we were and have lived our history alongside us. The back-lit Steve McQueen photograph of ‘The Lynching Tree’, 2013 taken while filming his Oscar-winning film Twelve Years A Slave is an enchanting snapshot of stillness following trauma. It’s a now peaceful woodland that was witness to a horrifying chapter of human history. The tree stands at it has always stood, indifferent yet marked by the tragedy it bore witness to.
This idea of trees through time is followed through to the later galleries, though having a more sweeping take on it as a concept. Much like standing in front of the cross-section of the trunk of a giant sequoia tree on display at the Natural History Museum, you’re asked to question our history’s insignificance in the face of living plants that have been around for several thousand years. With Ungo Rondinone’s haunting Wind Moon, 2011, the trunk of an ancient tree is cast in a ghostly aluminium which dominates the space like a forewarning spectre. It’s a stark and profound note to end this exhibition on that is sure to leave you tending that neglected London Plane in your garden.
Among the Trees is running at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre ’til 17th May. SouthbankCentre.co.uk
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