Dylan's lyrics and powerful images prove potent mix

Published on Wednesday 9 January 2008 09:25

Hard Rain *** The Royal Botanic Gardens

IT'S eerily silent, perhaps fittingly so. There is only the rustle of the wind in some exotic trees, and on occasion a siren in the distance.

Amidst the serenity and occasional scurrying of squirrels stands a notice board with a large "WARNING!" sign on it.

"The issues that are raised concern us all", it says of the Hard Rain exhibition at the Botanics. "Visitors are warned that they may find some of the images disturbing, but the challenges they evoke are disturbing – and must be confronted."

It is quite fitting then that this is an exhibition housed outside. Tarpaulin with photos and text printed on them are stretched across frames secured to the ground in the fossil garden. The cold January air hits your face and the ground is well worn where thousands of people have already witnessed the imagery immortalised in the pictures collected by Mark Edwards.

An introduction by Edwards explains that while the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon was taking place he was being rescued from the Sahara desert by a Tuareg nomad. It was there he heard a Bob Dylan lyric and was inspired to illustrate each line, depicting what Edwards describes as "our headlong collision with nature".

"I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans," sees a bird ravaged by pollution. This Edwards compares to small acts of pollution, such as leaving lights on and taps running.

In another, vultures watch on as a dog pokes at the dead body of a human, washed up at the front of the Taj Mahal.

While some images of natural forces of nature are quite beautiful, others of its effects on mankind are less so. A woman dropped to the floor, crying over the body of her brother who has been washed ashore following a tsunami is labelled with: "Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world."

Though the pictures set to the words of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall are obviously quite striking, it is a secondary display which matches them with explanatory text which really hammers the message home.

The first image – of Kathmandu, Nepal on Christmas day 1970 – makes little sense until explained on this commentary that it's now – as shown – a sprawling city overrun by smog.

Another, of cascading ice, looks stunning until you read that if the sea level rises by just one metre, it will make 20 million people homeless in Bangladesh and India alone.

The exhibition, though small, succeeds in making you think.

"You and I, and all of us in the rich world, are inadvertently destroying life on earth," he says and Edwards succeeds in highlighting the changes that have occurred so that these issues cannot be ignored.

&#149 Until January 31