Yes, the landmark exhibition opening Somerset House’s 2025 season is all about soil. Unless you are a pedologist, you might question if SOIL: The World At Our Feet will be worth your while. Can a topic as humdrum as the dirt beneath our feet be interesting? My answer is: sort of.
The exhibition is part science display, part art show, part anti-climate change call to action. If you think it sounds a tad confused, that’s because it is. Other than just ‘soil’, it is hard to sum up exactly what this exhibition is about.
‘Soil abounds with life,’ reads the wall text that begins the exhibition. ‘Look down’ it tells us, hoping to inspire awe at the ground we walk upon. It opens with some quite beautiful up-close images of bacteria, and planet-like photographs of microbes making patterns in earth. Not so pretty are the zoomed-in black and white photos of bugs – including a very scary ant – and grim up-close videos of slime mould. Not for the squeamish, but great if you’re into that stuff. Then there’s a nice immersive installation showing beautiful time lapses of seed germination and roots growing. After this everything gets a bit more random.
Can a topic as humdrum as the dirt beneath our feet be interesting? Sort of.
The bulk of the show is made up of artworks inspired by nature, made with natural materials (sometimes literally made with soil), or pertaining to some wider theme about the natural world. There’s definitely some cool stuff in here, including an Ana Mendieta super-8 video in which a vulva-shaped hunk of loam billows out ghostly smoke, and a haunting beeswax sculpture by Marguerite Humeau depicting an amorphous, undulating ‘body’. I was also moved by Ken Griffiths’ sweet photo series of an elderly couple standing in their garden through the different seasons, and some powerful remastered 1930s footage of Palestinians collecting wildflowers.
But what do all these disparate works mean when they come together? Not that much. As this exhibition loves to tell us, soil is everywhere, it’s the basis of all living things, everything comes back to soil, apparently. But that is also its downfall. The show, which is pretty big, covers too many different themes: climate change, colonisation, war, slavery, agricultural labour, scientific discovery, the life of plants, the financial markets.
There is no rhyme or reason to the order of the displays. One minute we are looking at a video showing how ochre pigment in paint is made from earth, the next we see an Iron Age sword, preserved by the ground it was buried in. SOIL has no clear narrative arc, which makes it hard to engage with. It is an accumulation of artworks, artefacts and science experiments, without much linking them all together.
It wants to be didactic, ending with a rallying cry about saving the planet from climate change, but unfortunately, the material on display isn’t enough to give it any oomph.
