For over two decades the Eden Project has offered Cornish tourists an escape from the very county they are they to visit and explore. Within the confines of a former claypit, the natural environments of Africa, Central and Southern America, tropical islands, California, Australia and the Mediterranean have been compressed together into an other-worldly experience beneath Nicholas Grimshaw’s celebrated biodomes. Beyond the pleasure-seeking thrill of Amazonian tree-top walks, a zipwire ride, and navigating the world in an afternoon, it is also an important research centre into natural restoration and ecological sustainability.

This happens through growing and science, but also through art and culture. An art gallery sits within the Core Building, a timber-structure designed by Jolyon Brewis of Grimshaw and Partners who drew from mathematical opposing spirals of pinecones and sunflowers. Originally constructed as the Eden Project’s offices, in 2018 it was converted into a community space, laboratory, and an arts centre which hosts exhibitions curated in tandem with the organisation’s scientific research and critical thinking.

The current exhibition, Acts of Gathering, presents a series of projects which consider our relationship to land and food within a changing environment. It is designed less as a fine-art top-down presentation of worldly knowledge, and more as a space of discovery and engagement towards how different cultures engage with and ritualise the land, and suitably begins with the offer for visitors to create their own totem to nature.


 
Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno’s video offers instructions to make an animal or natural element from clay, inviting the visitor to write a small note of how to improve the planet onto a piece of paper then secreting it within the creation. After being fired, these will then find their way onto an intricately woven straw and fabric sculpture which splays open to provide a surface to hold the growing collection of creatures and plants. Within each is a unique message, together they suggest a collective language of solidarity which will be needed to support change, the terracotta sculptures sit waiting like ritualistic totems.


Cornish artists Nina Royle and Lucy Stein also bring forth a sense of ritual and collective honour. A table sits at the centre of a mixed-media set piece which suggests of a harvest festival offering. Straw is bound and arranged, but amongst the array of drawings and objects things veer away from a Christian festival and deeper into its pagan roots. “A neck! A neck!” is written on the wall, referencing the Cornish Crying the Neck ceremony when the final shock of corn is cut from the land and held aloft to a collective proclamation.

The work speaks to more. Into the relationship of ritual to land are folded notions of femininity as well as questions around the history and rise of neo-paganism, and the post-harvest fallow period of land. “In capitalist production, that seasonal pause gets lost,” says Royle, speaking to an ever industrialised control of land which not only flattens out history, custom, and quirks of culture, but also the passage and rhythm of time.



Jonathan Baldock also uses corn in his contribution to Acts of Gathering. He has shaped it into four sinister masks, human-scale faces for imagined life-size corn dollies. There is both theatricality and fear within the anonymity and stuck expressions, perhaps aware of the eventual fate of the corn dolly as part of a sacrificial offer to the earth ahead of re-sowing.

There are more rituals in the work of Serge Attukwei Clottey, both new and old. A song calls the visitor towards bright yellow tent-like drapery, and once under its protective roof it can be heard more clearly. Better Days are Coming (2016-21) is an audio recording of the Ghanaian Ga people singing at their Homowo harvest festival, an event to remember what both the land has given, but also to keep in mind the famines of the pre-colonial country. With climate change pressing, poor crops recur and famines again threaten.

The hanging ceiling and walls suddenly feel less secure, just as the enticing song is discovered to be a refrain of loss and fear. It turns out that it’s made of cut up fragments of plastic oil drums, symbols of the Global North and toxicity, their history of national and corporate control and extraction here transformed into a semi-protective shelter. But, just as the beautiful song reminds of loss, Clottey’s re-manufactured material offers shade but in doing so constantly tells the story of the yellow plastic’s history. The repurposing of the barrels into such hanging structures is what the artist terms Afrogallonism, and the transformative process of cleaning, breaking apart, then stitching together the oil drums is itself a modern ritualistic process, one of undoing and reimagining.



The battle between modern corporate practice and an indigenous custodianship is present elsewhere. A triptych video work by Swiss artist Uriel Orlow takes the Artemisia afra plant as its focus, exploring the sustainable cultivation of it by a woman’s cooperative in Lumata in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a plant which offers a traditional medicine to care for the local population, an infusion of its leaves reportedly prevents and treats malaria, and the cooperative that Orlow both made the film of and spent several months working in uses proceeds from its sale to fund a collective health insurance.

One screen is devoted to a beautiful Congo folk song which speaks to the medicinal qualities of the plant, the lyrics extolling the values of choosing Artemisia afra over big pharma’s expensive pills. Another screen records the harvest process, accompanied by song, while the centre offers a bullet point essay over the geopolitics and post-colonial control of medicine.



It’s a small exhibition, but deep in idea and provocation, and within the few works on show strands can be drawn across cultures, time, and practice. The exhibition also spills outside of the gallery space – Jumana Manna’s film Foragers (2022) is being shown at CAST in Helston, deeper into the county, while Serge Attukwei Clottey will be coming over to the Eden Project to take part in their annual Reclaim Festival of mental and planetary wellbeing, 27-28 January 2024.

It's not the only contemporary art on display at the Eden Project. There are fifteen site-responsive installations across the landscaped site and within the two biodomes from artists including Ai Weiwei, Ryan Gander, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and El Anatsui. They, and the gallery, may not be the prime driver for visitors to the centre, but the works are more than a distraction or decoration to the plantlife on show, and instead seek to conjoin creative and scientific research into a progressive way of thinking about the world which draws on millennia of shared histories across human and non-human existence.