Artists

Sabian Baumann, Vivian Lynn, Nova Paul, Neal Jones, Shikh Sabbir Alam

Press release

Eyes in the Soil is an exhibition of work by Nova Paul, Neal Jones, Shikh Sabbir Alam, Vivian Lynn and Sabian Baumann. Across film, sculpture, painting, furniture and drawing, these artists conceive of the natural world as an animate, active force; as something that looks back. Beginning with the possibility that every tree has, and is, a story, Puawānanga is Nova Paul’s (Te Uriroroi, Te Parawhau, Ngāpuhi, b.1973, lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa/NZ) latest 16mm film, made using plant-based hand processing to create a developer emulsion made from the leaves of the foliage depicted in the work. Puawānanga is an aka, or clematis vine, that weaves its way through the ngahere (forest) and is the embodiment of the pua – the blossoming – of the wānanga (learning and reflection). The puawānanga, in this process, is more agent than subject: …the tree would give me an image, I wouldn’t take the image—which is a bit of a twist on the colonial gaze and extractive processes that often happen, including in image making, photographic image making, or moving-image making. Once you commit to that idea that you’ll be given the image, and you’re in that space, then it’s not a given that the tree is going to give you the image, is it? - Nova Paul in conversation with Karl Chitham, Art News Aotearoa, Issue 199, 9 November 2023 Paul’s film serves as a lens through which to consider other works in the show. A series of paintings by Shikh Sabbir Alam (b. 1982, Kushtia, Bangladesh, where he lives and works) derive from a practice that is guided by the surroundings in which they are painted, seeking to evoke scent, sound and atmosphere over a defined, mapped landscape. Gridded backdrops – apparent geometric stability – become porous structures against which forms refuse to resolve themselves. Alam describes his process as one of openness, remaining still while the flora and fauna of the mangrove forest offers itself up in brief sightings or slow surfacings. The minutiae of the environment is not sought out, but depicted on its own terms. In Vivian Lynn’s (b. 1931, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, d. 2018, Wellington) large-scale 1984 drawing on tracing paper, Wounded Garden, the garden is a mercurial, corporeal space, where the boundaries between the natural world and the body become undefined. Abundant suggestions of flowers, limbs and tresses of hair coalesce, only to dissolve again into nebulous abstraction. Sabian Baumann’s (b. 1962, Zug, Switzerland, lives in Zurich, Switzerland) works see fantastical scenes charged with bold animism; worlds in which bodies, environments and other forms of life are embedded within one another. The contours and elevations of the monumental landscape Erinnerung an die Menschen (2024) reveals itself to be made up of overlapping, resting faces, eyes turned skyward, like a reverse Arcimboldo. A deer grazes on a nasal hill, a rabbit burrows beneath an ear, a shorebird perches on a chin to monitor a pond formed in the hollow of a cheek. Along the skyline, a row of trees appears to parade on leg-like, exposed roots. A relief sculpted from unfired clay, Haufen Liebe (2026) presents figures lying across and over one another, touching, embracing, as if they are together growing from or dissolving into earth. The work of Neal Jones (b. 1969, Liverpool, UK, lives and works in London) is shaped by the environments he inhabits and frequents – most notably his Alexandra Palace allotment, depicted in the 2006 painting that gives the exhibition its title: Eyes in the Soil, in which eyes blink out of the vegetation as if sprouting directly from the earth. 2013’s Landscape with Flies charts the final landing places of a trio of small flies against a rolling fog. Chairs and lamps made of recycled, off-cut and found materials, extend Jones’s sensibility into a dimension that is both sculptural and functional, staunchly organic. With thanks to Nova Paul, Shikh Sabbir Alam, Sabian Baumann, Neal Jones, Jurgen Waibel, Christina Barton, STANDARD (OSLO), and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich.