Yorkshire Post
Knowing our place

By Yvette Huddleston

6 August 2021

A new exhibition in Sheffield, Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape, explores our relationship with the planet we live on.

When the curatorial team at Sheffield Museums first began planning the latest exhibition at the Millennium Gallery they could not have anticipated quite how timely it would become.

Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape from the Roberts Institute of Art, which opened this week, is an exploration of and a reflection on the natural world and our relationship with it, a relationship that has become ever more significant over the past 18 months or so. A collaboration with the RIA, the exhibition is part of Sheffield Museums’ ongoing Going Public programme which creates opportunities to share private collections, in this case David and Indrė Roberts, with public institutions. The show, co-curated by the RIA's Ned McConnell and Sheffield Museums' Louisa Briggs, also looks at urgent environmental issues and is framed around the important role landscape played historically in the development of Sheffield's industry.

"In our early conversations we knew we wanted to explore the climate crisis as a theme and the fact that we were at a critical point in our relationship with the Earth," says Briggs. "Then with the pandemic, landscape and the natural world took on a whole new level of importance — it became something that was fundamental to our health and wellbeing, so that came to the forefront for us too. We wanted to look at how we relate to the Earth in more detail and get people to reflect on that."

The exhibition features a wide range of works across a variety of different media including sculpture, photography, painting and installation. "It has been a joy to work with the RIA collection because it contains so many wonderful works from high calibre international artists," says Briggs. "And it has been exciting to show pieces from our own collection alongside those. It is interesting to see the works in conversation with each other."

For Briggs there are a few which particularly stand out. "There is a painting by Etel Adnan which is only about 30 cm square — it is very small but so powerful. She paints the view outside her window in California and she has distilled it down to its essential colours. This tiny work is incredibly beautiful — it speaks so much about Earth as home and our connection with it."

She also points to Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere's Schmerzensmann I, a large-scale sculpture with an altered human form mounted on a pole. "It eloquently communicates our frailty as human beings. It reminds us we are so dependent on our planet; although we might feel invincible, we aren't."

The themes running through the show suggest that perhaps it is time for humankind to exercise a little humility. "I hope it prompts people to think about the climate crisis, to not take the Earth for granted and maybe to lobby our politicians to do more to protect it," says Briggs. "I also hope it gets people out into the landscape to experience the natural beauty around them."

Thought-provoking and profound, Earthbound aims to encourage visitors to contemplate the future of the planet we inhabit and our own responsibility in taking care of it. With the UN's Cop26 Climate Change Conference fast approaching in November, and the powerful lessons about the fragility of human life that events of the past year and a half have taught us, it is a show that could not be more resonant.