Charles Darwin: Voyage of discovery

Published on Monday 26 October 2009 19:20

DARWIN'S EDINBURGH **** AN ENTANGLED BANK **** BOTH AT TALBOT RICE GALLERY, EDINBURGH

IN 1825, Charles Darwin arrived in Edinburgh as a callow young medical student. Realising early on that he had no great love of medicine, one of the places he liked to spend his days was in the University Museum, with its collection of stuffed exotic animals and birds.

As part of the Edinburgh International Festival this year, that space – now restored, minus the stuffed creatures, to be the Talbot Rice's Georgian Gallery – was home to a site-specific installation by Joseph Kosuth, referencing Darwin. Now it holds a display from the university's own historic collections (the display stands free because the room is, itself, an exhibit), accompanied next door in the Talbot Rice by a response to Darwin from five contemporary artists.

Darwin stayed in Edinburgh for just two years, but they were important years, according to Janet Brown's biography. Curators of Darwin's Edinburgh, John Scally, director of University Collections, and Iain Boyd White, professor of architectural history, illuminate both Darwin's time in Edinburgh (with his lecture notes, field diaries, matriculation records and so on) and the context of the day, alive with new scientific debate.

It didn't take the young Darwin – he was just 16 when he arrived in Edinburgh – long to fall out of love with medicine, the profession of his father and grandfather. The gruesome anatomy lectures and pre-anaesthesia surgery demonstrations left him traumatised. At the same time, discovering that he had a private income, he set about his own interests and moved to natural sciences.

If the medical faculty of the time tended to the conservative, the scientists were buzzing with debate. These were the early days of modern scientific method, full of discovery and argument. The ideas of geologist James Hutton fuelled vibrant arguments about the origins of rocks. Students – Darwin among them – explored the beaches on the Firth of Forth, examining tiny creatures under microscopes and arguing about the origins of life – debates that were much more free in Edinburgh than in Oxford and Cambridge, still heavily under the patronage of the Church.

It was in Edinburgh that Darwin gave his first lecture as a scientist, to the Plinian Society, a group of radical student scientists. A little more than six years later, he was on board the Beagle, on a voyage whose seeds might have been sown among the collections of exotic birds and animals in the University Museum (including a live ocelot, which was treated as a pet).

The display ends, provocatively, with a page from the handwritten manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, one of a small number still in existence. Though it was not published until 1859, it is commonly agreed that the ideas were formed much earlier, and it seems at least possible that they began in this city, perhaps even in this room.

Next to the manuscript page is a new sculpture by Kenny Hunter, Yield Brother, the head of a chimpanzee, lying horizontal on a table top. It seems at once to link us to Darwin's world, making the first astonishing connections between men and apes, and to our own, in which we are much more intensely aware of the problems of science and its responsibilities.

This is the intriguing bridge between the historical and the contemporary. Darwin's age was alive with a spirit of discovery, a freedom to range across disciplines, to make links and forge ideas, which is much less common in today's increasingly specialised world of science. That breadth, sense of wonder and freedom to question more easily find a platform in the world of the arts.

Darwin wrote of the wonder of "an entangled bank" where so many species seems to live together interdependently. Talbot Rice principal curator Pat Fisher has commissioned five artists under this title, contrasting in their approaches, but also harmonising with aspects of Darwin's life, work and thought.

There is something of the 19th-century scientist about Ilana Halperin, particularly in her carefully documented field notes of her visit to the live volcano Kilauea on Hawaii, meticulously illustrated by pencil diagrams of lava bombs and lava flows. She also submits photographs and film which capture the immediacy and elemental nature of this unfolding piece of geology, which is, as the artist herself writes, "alive, like me".

The challenge is how to translate all this discovery and observation into a work of art, and, poignant as her lava stamps are, with their burned imprints on paper acting as unique prints, they don't quite capture the vividness and depth of her encounter.

There is a similar sense of challenge, of trying to capture in art something which is unfolding, with new work by Brian Hewitt, a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art's MFA course. As the viewer walks between two large screens of constantly scrolling DNA data, we are caught between a sense of wonder and our inability as laymen to understand this technical information. More easily graspable is Hewitt's earlier piece, The Reckoning, another live work which counts the number of seconds since Hewitt's birth, alongside other tallies, such as the number of stars extinguished, humans born and species extinct.

Christine Borland is well known as an artist who asks questions of medical and scientific processes. In this case, she has taken prosthetic models used in medical teaching – "Choking Charlie", used for the Heimlich manoeuvre, "CP Arlene" and so on – and cast their heads in plaster. Arranged in bell jars, they look like ancient sculptures, or death masks. Also, strangely, they look much more human, faces in a grimace of pain or in the expressionless state of the unconscious. Further captured on digital film they look more haunting still.

Kenny Hunter has two works here in addition to Yield Brother. The Unknown models the skeleton of a giant, a sort of evolutionary missing link, like those ardently sought by Victorian museums. Hunter's figure, like Borland's heads, is both poignant and stylised. As ever, he is aware of his sculptural predecessors, especially the moderns, from Henry Moore to Eduardo Paolozzi.

The Rise of the Raptors continues the theme of urban wildlife which he developed at his show in Tramway last summer. Nature – like this hawk in an urban wasteland – continues to adapt and survive, and this work also shows the continued evolution of Hunter's own sculptural forms.

Film-maker Ben Rivers makes perhaps the most surprising addition, but possibly the most deeply empathetic contribution to this group of five. His film Origin of the Species focuses on a man in his seventies who makes a life for himself in the wilds of a Highland forest, speaking about his lifelong fascination with Darwin's ideas. This sensitive film, showing him working on his home and workshop, mingled with lingering shots of the beauty of the natural world – the colour of autumn bracken, the dust on a spider's web – adds an important component to the mix.

Similar themes are echoed in his second work, I Know Where I'm Going, a record of a road trip from London to Mull, always taking time to go off the beaten track to find those who live on the margins. While both films would benefit from clearer sound delivery, they remind us of something that Darwin knew well: the importance of the path into the wilderness, and what might be discovered there.

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