We are all nature

Reforesting Scotland is a publication and an organisation whose aims I have supported since the days of the Tree planter’s guide to the galaxy. It was therefore something of a pleasant surprise and an honour to be asked to contribute some of my own thoughts on the topic of this issue devoted specifically to art. As an art critic for The times in London and later the Sunday herald, I was often struck by the amount of art which could be described as ‘urbanistic’. By ‘urbanistic’ I mean not only relating to cities but also deriving from them. It would be foolish and unfair to categorise all of the city-based art in this way but I often felt that this art lacked not only a moral depth but also a kind of spiritual gravitas.

Art follows fashion and those who dare to step beyond the prevalent norm are, if not ostracised then, at least, marginalised. During the late 1980s, under the Directorship of David Harding, Glasgow School of Art established its ground-breaking Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art. It was a bold move for such an august institution but the guiding principle behind this new department was that art could and should be made from and about anything that the artist deemed worthy of consideration – it was about an ‘expanded’ view of sculpture; as such it could be fairly seen as part of the philosophical and exemplary legacy of the great German thinker and artist Joseph Beuys.

At the Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art, artists were invited to penetrate the surface of society and investigate what lay beneath. The term ‘environment’ was therefore considered in a broad sense – that is, deriving from ‘what surrounds us’. I remember reading an article by the historian-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff in which he warned against the abuse or misuse of such terminology. Broadly he noted that as long as we – humankind – continued to use the term ‘environment’ (as its etymology suggests) we were imperilling the very thing we sought to protect by viewing it as something which surrounds us, and is therefore, by definition, not part of us.

This view had been expressed earlier in the history of art and ideas by the American painter Jackson Pollock. When asked if he worked from nature (meaning, presumably, still-lives) he answered, “I am nature”. Pollock had it right. We are all nature and all of nature is in us, if only we could learn how to let it in. A number of the essays here discuss artists whose work is not only informed by nature but made from it, not only in a material sense but also a spiritual one. None of this is said in any way to denigrate the achievements of those graduates of Glasgow’s Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art (many of whom went on to achieve great acclaim in the wider world of art). If we are ‘nature’ then the cities which we make and the lives we lead within them are, by any philosophical reckoning, ‘natural’.

Over several years, working on a couple of publications about the wood artist Tim Stead, I came across a number of views and debates in which Stead and others were engaged. At one juncture Stead told me that he was not influenced by the history of art but rather ‘by nature’. I found this view difficult to countenance although I believe his intentions were pure and honest. But he was trained also, as it happens, at Glasgow School of Art where one of the greatest geniuses in the history of world art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, had been both a student and a teacher. Mackintosh’s drawings, buildings, furniture and other designs, although original, were part of a wider European movement – and nature was both their focus and their inspiration. Stead’s claim wasn’t disingenuous, simply inaccurate and contestable. Even a quick glance at his high-backed chairs made one immediately think of Mackintosh.

Moving around Scotland’s art schools, galleries and museums and also seeing evidence of the expanding residency movement (which allows artists to work in often rural settings) I detect a greater interest in the natural rhythms and patterns which surround us and of which we are a part, if only we have the eyes to see it, the ears to hear it and the wisdom to understand it. It’s something greatly to be welcomed, as is evidenced by the work of the many artists whose work is discussed here. Giles Sutherland is a writer and critic who lives in Dunbar, East Lothian.

Reforesting Scotland 37 Spring 2008