REVIEW Jun 2025 ‘Between the Earth and the Sky’ at New Adelphi Gallery

Simal Rafique

Postgraduate researcher and writer Simal Rafique visits Between the Earth and the Sky (28 January – 25 July 2025) at the New Adelphi Gallery, part of the University of Salford. A curation of fifteen artworks, including previously unseen prints from the University’s collection and from contemporary artists such as Jessica El Mal, Darren Almond, Liang Yue, Mishka Henner and Bridget Riley, capture the transience of seasons, weathers and the diurnal. Also on display are new works by two Salford-based practitioners: Alex Nelu’s archival pigment prints trace the topography of the West Pennine Moors and Josh Turner photographs the traces of human presence in post-industrial landscapes.

Upon searching the question, what is nature? online, the corrosive irony of seeing an automatic ‘AI Overview’ appear on my laptop screen infuriates me. I turn to good old-fashioned books. Supposedly, nature refers to everything which is not human and it is opposed to culture, to history, to what is artificially worked or produced, in short, to everything which is defining of the order of humanity.(1) Nature comprises the wilderness (deserts, oceans, uninhabitable regions) and the sublime (forests, mountains, lakes and waterfalls); but its hierarchy perhaps discounts the agriculture of the English countryside and the picturesque beauty of gardens and parks which are contaminated by human touch.(2) According to the famous words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), life in the State of Nature is, to quote, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ For others, nature is nothing more than an anthropomorphic construct ‘created by Wordsworth and [the Romantics] for their own purposes’.(3)

Pondering these select definitions and remarks, I turn to the latest exhibition at the New Adelphi Gallery at University of Salford where I am greeted by Curator Stephanie Fletcher. Here, a short stroll away from Peel Park, a luscious Victorian greenspace on the floodplains of the River Irwell, photography and video art intersect with local printmaking practices to illustrate the metamorphoses of nature as a sanctuary for mental wellbeing and rejuvenation. Using film imagery and video stills, Leipzig-based Christiane Baumgartner’s woodcuts on Japanese Kozo paper capture the transience of nature through modes of sequence and repetition in Nordlicht - 6.08pm (2018) and Prometheus I-III (2021), prints from two series which record the movements of the setting sun. In the entrance of the exhibition, Baumgartner’s heliotropic image is presented next to two cyanotypes that are more aligned with Mancunian weather.

Spring Rain 09.12.22 (2023) is an abstract-looking diptych by British-Moroccan artist Jessica El Mal. Mal’s cyanotypes were produced accidentally during a rooftop printmaking workshop in Morocco, which has experienced a six-year drought, aggravated by climate change and the depletion of water resources by colonial-era dams, as well as by the cultivation of Israeli-owned avocado farms. Heavy with connotations of renewal and salvation, the title Spring Rain derives from a verse by Syria’s national poet Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani: ‘Arab children,/ Spring Rain,/ Corn ears of the future,/ You are the generation/ That will overcome defeat.’ Mal’s work also engages with the writings of Naomi Klein and the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a wave of uprisings against authoritarian leaders in the MENA region during the early 2010s. Raindrops splash and drip down the light-sensitive paper, transforming the Victorian print technology with a contemporary resonance on climate justice and the struggle for political freedoms. Today the cost of the Abraham Accords and global normalisation with Israel forces Qabbani’s Arab children to confront a bleaker reality: when it rains it pours.

Also included in ‘Between the Earth and the Sky’, there are landscape prints from the University of Salford’s growing collection of modern and contemporary artworks, a third of which is digitised for online browsing. Established in the late 1960s, little is known about the provenance and subject matter of these etchings, linocuts and aquatints that have been tucked away in storage for decades. Still, the nostalgic feel of the artists Derek Wilkinson, Phil Greenwood, Peter Green and Charles Bartlett lends an impression of homeliness and familiarity to depictions of the outdoors. In Winter Reflection – Rydal, the perspective used by Halifax-born art teacher Derek Wilkinson reminds me of a view I experienced biweekly this winter in the bucolic Yorkshire countryside: the smudged chromatic effect on the lower edge of the work captures the act of glancing through the window of a moving train from Leeds to Manchester. A quaint village in Cumbria, Rydal is a picturesque landscape with strong links to Romantic literature in England, once home to William Wordsworth and frequently visited by poet Matthew Arnold.

Throughout the group exhibition, artists like Wilkinson exploit the technique of pathetic fallacy to promote quiet contemplation. Coined in 1856 in volume three of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, pathetic fallacy denotes a tendency to see one’s emotions reflected in the environment. An early environmentalist who advocated for open greenspaces (like the nearby Peel Park), Ruskin warned against the “storm-cloud” of the Industrial Revolution and cautioned against pollution. Adjacently, Phil Greenwood’s White Sky possesses a Magrittesque, fantastic quality that may be due to its production as an amalgamation of places recalled through memory. Here, light and shadow contradict the chance placement of a row of five, anthropomorphic trees, rooted in an otherwise empty green field with blue skies and fluffy clouds overhead. The reminiscent power it holds is like a visual tranquiliser for me, plunging me into a dreamworld that also resembles the default wallpaper of Microsoft’s Windows XP, an image of apple-green rolling hills perhaps as iconic as Constable’s Hay Wain.

Today, the University of Salford’s collection commissions contemporary artists under three strands: About the Digital, From the North and Chinese Contemporary Art, which are clearly represented in the curation. COO18 (2018), Liang Yue’s digital video of Pier Head in Liverpool, meditates on the feeling of homesickness during a two month residency at the Open Eye Gallery, for a looped duration of two minutes and 17 seconds. The Shanghai-based artist was reminded of her memories of the Bund, a waterfront promenade lined with colonial-era and modern buildings in China. Mishka Henner’s Selfie (2017) imposes a zoomed-out, thumbnail of the earth onto a reflective, black aluminium sheet in order to diminish the self-aggrandising traits of the Anthropocene. Selfie references the Apollo 8 Astronaut Jim Lovell who recounted in 1968: ‘At one point I sighted the earth with my thumb – and my thumb from that distance fit over the entire planet. I realised how insignificant we all are if everything I’d ever known is behind my thumb.’ Emphatically, man is no longer the measure of all things.

Often, the perspective of the Earth as a spherical unified whole, seen from a synoptic view, overwhelms the senses: according to cartographic historian Denis Cosgrove, ‘to achieve the global view is to lose the bonds of the earth, to escape the shackles of time, and to dissolve the contingencies of daily life for a universal moment of reverie and harmony.’(4) For Cosgrove, the term ‘globe’ associates the planet with the abstract form of spherical geometry, emphasizing volume and surface over material constitution or territorial organizations, such as empire.(5) In Henner’s Selfie, a title which refers to the ubiquitous act of photographing a self-portrait with an electronic camera or smartphone held at arm’s length, the artist undoes this awe-inspiring experience induced by the Earth and replaces it with a stern comment on the cosmic insignificance of the human species on the planet, which is itself a pale blue dot suspended in a void. Henner’s “thumbnail”, on the contrary, provokes a realisation of mortal triviality, of humanity confronting its selfie’d reflection.

Closer to home, Salford graduate Josh Turner’s practice unfurls left-to-right in books, zines and prints that are presented inside a glass vitrine. In the black-and-white photobook Float like a feather, sink like a stone, Turner records discarded post-industrial objects and traces of human intervention in the Manchester Pennines, a zone which overlaps the open moorlands and suburban towns in the East. A text from Turner reads: ‘The water is ushered, seeds are sewn, rock hewn, tunnels bored, hounds called, pines marshalled, stone shaped, pheasants flushed, feet dipped, mortar mixed, feathers plucked, fuel burnt, soul compressed, daylight saved, history abided.’ A juxtaposition is central to his environmental aesthetic: nature (water, seeds, rocks, pines, etc.) is presented in conjunction with agriculture, hunting, fuel, tunnels and the manufacture of history. Alex Nelu’s archival pigment prints the wind was blowing as I was walking on marshy ground (2024) explore territory similar to Turner’s, although Nelu’s practice also speaks to his experience as a Romanian immigrant. Photographs of footpaths and Roman roads as well as quarries and mine shafts dissolve into the moorlands, leaving subtle traces of dislocation and protrusion that allegorise a diasporic aesthetic through nature.

Beauty leaps off the ultramarine walls at the New Adelphi Gallery. Personally, I am sceptical about the revival of a post-Romantic framework that prioritises the aesthetics of nature over resisting the environmental threats posed by governmental, industrial, commercial and neocolonial policies. Last month, the wretched soil of our Earth was certainly ‘contaminated, eroded, drained, burnt, exploded, flooded and impoverished’ (6) in Houthi-led Hodeidah, the second largest port in Yemen which regularly disrupts the business-as-usual passage of arms convoys and trading ships en route to Israel through the Red Sea. Apocalyptic flames engulfed the city after an evening airstrike, leaving devastation in its wake; but these images did not receive a similar response to the January California wildfires, with Meta swiftly removing several posts of the horrific scenes and conducting shadowbans. Land degradation, pollution and genocidal “scorched earth” policies are destroying our planet at an accelerating pace; and a true eco-consciousness acknowledges the racialised populations that are exposed first to what Naomi Klein describes as ‘the violence of othering in a warming world.’(7) Tranquil as the glittering waves of Bridget Riley’s op art screenprints From one to the other (2005) and Freeze (2000) may be to the local community of students and Salford residents, ultimately it is commissions by contemporary artists like Jessica El Mal that comprise the ecocritical vanguard at the New Adelphi’s latest show.

Footnotes

(1)   Kate Soper “The Discourses of Nature”. In What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, 15. Oxford: Blackwell: 1995.

(2)   Peter Barry “Ecocriticism”. In Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 246. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 2002.

(3)   Jonathan Bate “From ‘Red’ To ‘Green’”. In The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, Ed. Laurence Coupe, 171. London: Routledge, 2000.

(4)   Denis Cosgrove “Imperial and Poetic Globe.” In Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, 3. Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

(5)   Ibid., 8.

(6)   Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions.” Third Text, 32:2–3, 2018, 163.

(7)   Naomi Klein “Let them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World”, London Review of Books 38:11, June 2016.

University of Salford Art Collection share the Fourdrinier’s passion for shining a light on contemporary art in the North and fostering new writing talent, and have paid for this review.

The views expressed in this review are solely those of the author.