This Fragile Earth, Stirling review: artists offer 'wider view' of the Anthropocene

If the fragility of our planet sometimes seems like a uniquely 21st century problem, a new show at the University of Stirling shows that it has been preoccupied Scottish artists for many decades, writes Duncan Macmillan

Installation view of This Fragile Earth at the University of Stirling | Contributed

This Fragile Earth, University of Stirling ★★★★

The Extinction Collection, The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

John McLean: Pleasure Garden, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

Art that is simply about “issues”, if it is not polemic — and that is something different — can be boring and self-important. When it is really good however, with both breadth and depth, the issues are implicit in a wider vision. That is the premise of This Fragile Earth, a Fleming Collection touring exhibition now on display at the University of Stirling’s Pathfoot Building. Some time ago, the collection’s director, James Knox, changed a static collection into a source for touring exhibitions taking Scottish art to a wide public around the UK. Fittingly for its theme, the present show began in Coventry Cathedral. Symbol both of fragility and resurgence, the cathedral offered closure to the era opened by Picasso’s Guernica — the slaughter of the innocent by war from the air. Sadly, as Ukraine, Gaza and now Lebanon illustrate so terribly, that was not to be. Picasso’s prophetic vision had no end date.

The theme of the present exhibition is not the devastation of war, however, but the increasingly perilous condition of our planet in the era now named, grimly, the anthropocene: not shaped by any cosmic force, just by us, the smartest of the apes. The stimulus for the show was perhaps the gift from the artist’s family to the Fleming collection of James Morrison’s Arctic Mural prompting the director to observe how in this painting, but also in the work of several other Scottish artists, anxiety about the issue of climate change was prefigured years ago.

The Arctic Mural is a huge painting, arched in shape, 20 feet across and half as high as it is wide. Here, however, I have to declare an interest. In 1995, I put on an exhibition in the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh of Morrison’s paintings done following a visit he made to the Canadian Arctic in 1994. I had previously invited Jon Schueler to paint in the gallery as a kind of performance during an exhibition of his work. This was well received, so I asked Morrison if he would like to do the same and so he produced this epic painting of Grize Fjord working in the gallery.

The arch of the picture echoes the arch of the sky, but implicitly too the curve of the earth, somehow seeming more apparent so near to the Pole. The size allowed the artist to convey how the immenseness of the polar landscape overwhelmed him. He was also deeply impressed by its fragility, however, and equally by the fortitude of the Inuit people he met. Displaced by their government, their careless treatment, he felt, echoed an equal carelessness towards the landscape itself. Morrison’s epic vision is also complemented here by a wonderful photograph by Thomas Joshua Cooper. Taken at the North Pole in freezing fog, it is mostly white with undulations in the ice just visible as lines of grey shadow.

Installation view of This Fragile Earth at the University of Stirling | Contributed

Around 30 years ago, Frances Walker expressed her anxiety about climate change and the vulnerability of Tiree, then her summer base. She saw how the island was threatened, not only by oil spills, but also by rising sea levels, apparent even then where the delicate transition from dune to beach was being disrupted by the rising sea. Her painting here, After the Storm, shows the verdant green of the Tiree machair, the dunes, and at the horizon a line of grey and implicitly threatening sea. Walker also did a series of paintings of the islands of Scotland that, once inhabited, are now empty, their former dwellings derelict. This sense of the fragility and indeed impermanence of the human presence, not only echoes Morrison’s feeling for the fate of the Inuit, but also the work here of both Elizabeth Ogilvie and Will Maclean.

A previous generation of Elizabeth Ogilvie’s family was evacuated from St Kilda when life there was deemed no longer viable and in 1987 she made a pilgrimage to her ancestral island. A beautiful six panel screen here with a single image of a mighty, breaking wave done in 1988 was part of her response. The fragility of life on the edge or beyond has also always been a theme in Will Maclean’s work and is illustrated here by North West Passage, Arctic Route. It is a relief with an enigmatic shape at the centre — whale or sinking ship — and other imagery suggesting tragedy at sea, and reflects on the fate of early Arctic explorers like Franklin and Hudson. The imagery also echoes Morrison’s awe at the Arctic landscape. Ephemeris, the title of Maclean’s other work here, suggests the ephemeral, the implicit theme perhaps of the whole show, but it is actually the name given to tables of astronomical data used from earliest times by navigators, by astrologers too and apparently now for GPS signals. These tables may guide navigators, but they also measure our place in the Universe.

Glen Onwin was one of the first artists to take the issue of climate change directly into his art and in 1988 had a show that he called Revenges of Nature. Photosynthesis Open Kingdom here is a really striking work from that time. In it the golden disc of the sun is set in a field of fern leaves scattered with splashes of water and with the dark earth beneath. It is a wonderful visual metaphor for one of the driving forces of life on earth.

Serendipitously, The Extinction Collection at the Fine Art Society explores a very similar theme in a group of 22 works by 15 artists. Central to the concept of the show are works that use fossils and other material from Happisburgh, a village by the sea in Norfolk. Site of the earliest know human habitation in the UK, it is now likely also to be one of the first communities lost to the rising sea.

Julian Stair’s Ossuaries, for instance, consists of receptacles made from Happisburgh clay displaying fossils of mammoth, rhinoceros and of wood. Richard Deacon has set fossilised mammoth and elephant teeth on bases of fossilised wood mounted in turn on granite.

Work by Conrad Shawcross at FAS, Edinburgh | Fine Art Society, Edinburgh

Emily Young has set a beautiful stone axe from Happisburgh on a partially carved head of ancient stone, while Conrad Shawcross has set a similar piece of worked flint, also from Happisburgh, on a disk of blue glass. Against the transparent blue of the glass, the flint looks as though it is suspended in time, while time itself is illustrated in Clay Moon by Jon Foreman. Represented here by a photograph, this was a lunar disk made from lumps of clay from the eroding cliffs of the shoreline at Happisburgh. In a suitable metaphor, the work was then washed away by the tide. Stone Moon by the same artist repeats its shape laid out on the floor, but made not from clay, but from stones from a beach in Pembrokeshire as far to the west as you can go from Norfolk. The inference is that if much of the other work here reflects the history and predicament of this very special locality, the relevance of these studies in time and extinction has no limitation of place.

After so much extinction I might ask as King Lear did for “an ounce of civet, to sweeten my imagination” and that is indeed provided at FAS by Pleasure Garden, the lyrical beauty of John McLean’s abstract paintings hanging on the walls all round.

This Fragile Earth until 8 August 2025; The Extinction Collection and John McLean until 19 November