“The submarines are very timely again,” Caragh Thuring remarked drily at the press view of her new show at Hastings Contemporary. As a child, Thuring watched nuclear submarines slink around the lochs of the Scottish coast. The natural beauty of the landscape was marked by the unnatural architecture needed to sustain these weapons. The ominous silhouette of a submarine recurs in her paintings, most notably in the large canvas The Silent Service, and as her show opens in Hastings, the apocalypse again casts a lengthening shadow, as Russia’s leaders turn to nuclear brinkmanship to salvage their failing invasion of Ukraine.



The submarines – and the weapons they carry – never went away between the Cold War and today, they just kept a lower profile. That’s what they do, of course, they keep a low profile, they lurk, they disappear from view, while the death they carry remains the same. In this, they have some surprising affinities with another Thuring motif, the volcano. Both are characterised by hidden stores of awful destructive power. And yet in normal circumstances they betray little of this power.

Much of Thuring’s work lingers on the mechanical and the industrial. Ophaal Brug met Fonkelingen, a stark painting of a lifting bridge, dominates the main exhibition space, but the brute superstructure is balanced by delicate, wavering railings and little yellow lights. Lighterman is also dominated by heavy metal, which features a somewhat constructivist crane, but again comes across more cheerful or fond than industrial.

These are all works resolutely based on the artificial, but while what really animates Thuring’s work is a strange interplay between the natural and the man-made. This is not pointed – “I’m not interested in being didactic,” she says – but it is pervasive. Thuring’s continual orbiting of certain ideas betrays something of her steady, deliberate creative process. The paintings and drawings are often energetic and fast of hand – she says that they can take between a day and two years to complete – but the thoughts behind them are slower and more careful. Thuring says she can sit with an idea for years before acting on it, and the same concepts circle and recombine: “These things brew up over time in different concoctions,” as she puts it.

In the numbered pen and ink series Deck, a worker on a boat entangles and disappears into the complexity of the boat they are working on, with the boundary between them unclear. The relationships are often deliberately unclear and provocative, such as in Dutch Details, a window frame with a detailed foreground of plant life, which references the Dutch custom of carefully posed windowsill displays and toys with the indoor and the outdoor. A similar vibe holds over Palm Springs, an attractive assemblage that lingers on strange, cultured, topiary-like vegetation: plants made into sculptural objects.


Bricks and brick walls recur as a particular symbol of this paradoxical territory. Brick is, Thuring says, “the perfect example of something that’s natural and man-made”, the materials of the earth given regularity and purpose by human industry. Which brings us back to the volcanoes. Volcanoes are among the landforms most resistant to any kind of human involvement or alteration – not unlike nuclear weapons, if they’re in full flow, our best hope is to be elsewhere.

In a way the volcano is the exception that proves Thuring’s rule, and she repeatedly plays with the idea, bringing together unruly erupting volcanoes and obedient, orderly brick. This leads to some of the more anarchic and unsettling paintings in the show. Thuring places blazing volcanoes behind brick walls, and in one strange, dreamlike painting presents us with a brick-built volcano, an erupting pyramid.



For Thuring, the volcano offers a “vast language” of symbolism. “They represent many things,” she says, being both seductive and destructive: “They’re sexual, they’re emotional.” Even if they scorn and overwhelm the man-made, they have an agency and an artificiality of their own, without our involvement. Their destructiveness does not lead to nothing, it reshapes and makes landscapes of its own. “They are architectural, they build themselves,” she says.

It might be something of a niche within landscape painting but there is a long tradition of volcano painting, in particular connected to the Enlightenment Grand Tour of Italy and pursuit of the sublime. Thuring is influenced by many of the same landscapes – Vesuvius and the uncanny territory of Campi Fleigre – and fond of the kitschy volcano paintings made for tourists, but doesn’t see herself in the same lineage.
 

With this in mind, one wonders if her violent but approachable volcanoes are more a comment on the man-made side of the paradox. Here is a surrogate for the errant, unpredictable, libidinal, and destructive sides of our industrial civilisation, which grooms and refines and tunes the world even as it brews up ways to destroy it. The submarine, for all its horrible capability, is too sleek and civilised a symbol, and the volcano is needed to bring it some kind of balance – an uneasy balance, naturally. Or unnaturally.