Sea, Soil, Stone: A Summer Show

12 Jul - 8 Aug 2025 Golden Square

Frith Street Gallery is delighted to present Sea, Soil, Stone, a summer exhibition of gallery artists. Spanning the past two decades, the works explore our symbiotic relationship with the environment, reflected in recent campaigns to change the dictionary definition of ‘nature’ to include humans, and ongoing research into the complex relationships between fungi, trees and people.

This show offers a hopeful reflection upon the fundamental co-dependence of human beings and the landscape, the timescale of human life and our expressions of deep reverence for our environment. Artists are frequently drawn to the dichotomies of the natural world; mountains can be sublime yet deadly, plants can be both medicine and poison. They are intrigued by the wild beauty of nature, as well as our attempts to tame and exploit it.

The works here are loosely grouped under their exploration of sea, soil, or stone. These are often overlapping categories, as avalanches descend from the mountains to the sea, and estuaries bring seawater to the land.
Raqs Media Collective, More Salt In Your Tears, 2011/2018
The exhibition opens with Raqs Media Collective’s More Salt in Your Tears (2011/2018). Due to global warming, the water levels of the world’s oceans are rising as mountain glaciers melt. As oceans rise and expand, they impart their salt into nearing inland seas, causing the Baltic Sea to progressively become saltier. This lightbox, which documents an intervention by the artists, warns that, as long as the level of salt in that sea is lower than that of human tears, fresh water supplies will remain available and the unique ecosystem of the Baltic Sea will survive.
Bridget Smith, Glacier (The Tears of the Avalanche Girl), 2006/2008
Positioned opposite is a photograph of a glacier taken by Bridget Smith while artist in resident in New Zealand. During this time, Smith travelled much of the country documenting the landscape from a multitude of perspectives – social, cosmic and environmental. Glacier (The Tears of the Avalanche Girl) (2006/2008) captures the vast frozen rockface at Franz Josef/Waiau, a mountain accompanied by a Māori legend that cautions respect for the rockface and its great power. The Māori name for Franz Josef ‘Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere’ refers to a young woman who, ignoring such warnings, would regularly climb the mountain, only to have her lover swept away by an avalanche. Her tears are thus thought to be immortalised in the frozen glacier. For Smith, this image captures the transitionary space of interior and exterior landscape – the dark mouth of the mountain reaching into the unknown. It also pays homage to deep the connection of Māori culture to landscape, and a mourning for that which is gradually being lost.
Dorothy Cross, Little Boy Foot and Fin, 2008
Dorothy Cross’s Little Boy Foot and Fin (2008) brings together the bronze cast of a child’s foot with a rubber flipper washed up on a beach near her home in Connemara. These forms of footwear, which serve as protective second skins, evoke both the human desire to adapt to the marine environment, as well as the aching vulnerability of the body itself when faced with the power of the sea.
"The world is a movement of forces, invisible and subterranean, intimate and uncanny."

– Raqs Media Collective
Daphne Wright, Moles, 2007
Daphne Wright’s Moles (2007) are exquisitely disquieting. The familiarity of the mole from wildlife books and children’s stories ignites a process of recognition in the viewer as we are lured in to contemplate the animal bodies, yet their rectangular torsos and blunt limbs, shift the animals into an unfamiliar territory of abstract language. The mole is a curious animal, with its soft, velvety body and its poor vision; farmers consider it to be a pest in agricultural areas. The mole can contaminate soil particles and make grass unpalatable to cattle, the burrowing of the animal covers pasture with fresh soil reducing its yield and causing damage to agricultural machinery by exposing stones. It is common practice to trap or poison moles and flood or smoke the animal out of its burrow, killing or removing the creatures. The moles, suspended and poignantly cast present the animal as a waste product of farming practice, a pest, vermin, a piece of detritus.
Dorothy Cross, Foxglove (curvy), 2013
When discussing her bronze Foxglove (curvy) (2013), part of a series, Dorothy Cross tells the story of how when she was a child ‘we were told never to place our fingers in a foxglove and then lick them or we would go blind.’ In reality, rather than causing blindness, a group of medicines called digitalin can be extracted from foxgloves to be used as treatments for heart conditions. If one ingests too many digitalin however, vision can become distorted to make one see only in blue and white, an idea that continues to fascinate Cross.
Fiona Tan, West Pier II, 2006
Fiona Tan’s West Pier II (2006) is from a series of photographs depicting the seabound ruin of the West Pier in Brighton. The artist returned to this location and recorded the slowly collapsing ruin in different light and weather conditions. It was damaged by storms and then devastated by fires in 2003 but has become a haven for bird and marine wildlife. As with Cross’ disintegrating flipper, washed upon the shore, the disappearing structure signals the residues of human existence that will remain long after we are gone.
Massimo Bartolini, Untitled, 2008 & Untitled, 2008
Massimo Bartolini’s two Untitled (2008) drawings in blue and white, from a distance look like abstract patterns, randomly mapped onto the page. Upon closer inspection, carefully constructed rows of Oleander bushes appear, their formations determined by folds in the paper. The rows of foliage thus become demarcations, boundaries that may indicate fields or plots of land. Bartolini is interested in the coming together of the natural landscape with the artificial spaces constructed by human beings.
John Riddy, Blakeney (8), 2021
In Blakeney (8), 2021, John Riddy takes the viewpoint on the Norfolk Coast Path looking towards Blakeney Point with his camera. The horizon, which carefully divides the composition in two, indicates a shingle ridge that protects the marsh from the North Sea, disrupted by a single building silhouetted against the white-grey sky. The horizon is central to the human perspective on a landscape. This work captures a specific moment, tracing the effects of time, weather and shifting light, describing those temporal changes in silence and stillness.
Jaki Irvine, Stonestring, 2022 & Splinetrap, 2022
Jaki Irvine’s Stonestring & Splinetrap (2022) are two short videos shown here on a single monitor. They are acoustic and visual experiments that draw on both industrial and natural elements. In Stonestring, a rock slowly pulses and shape-shifts as yellow strings are seemingly driven across its surface by piano music, composed by Irvine. It is, in essence, a form of sound drawing. This is interspersed with the shorter work, Splinetrap. Here a yellow string is caught and engulfed by a shifting blue net, slithering across dark stone. Everything crackles. Simultaneously inanimate and animate, these works play on unspoken anxieties and pleasures, proposing new ways of looking and listening. The works are shown on a floor-standing monitor, like an animated window to some different beyond.
Tacita Dean, Significant Form (Group Two), 2021
For the work Significant Form (2021), Tacita Dean selected 130 postcards from her found postcard collection, which she has gathered at flea markets over many decades. Shown here is Group Two, comprising of 16 images that have been re-photographed and photochemically hand-printed at various scales and on a variety of papers. Inspired by her shared interests with Barbara Hepworth, Dean selected images that depicted a representation of, or potential for, sculptural form, creating an intuitive journey through objects and formations found in the natural world, to others made by artists across time. Presented without attribution or explanation, Dean’s free-flowing constellation of images encourages us, the viewer, to follow our own readings and associations, and find our own significance in forms encountered in the world around us.
Massimo Bartolini, Grotoni e Malocchi, 2019
Soil is one of the most crucial components of the earth’s health, containing over 50,000 species and – after the ocean – acting as a key site of carbon absorption. Massimo Bartolini’s Grotoni e Malocchi (2019) is an homage to humble soil, elevating the material on two slender, white ceramic plinths. While the words grotoni and malocchi are untranslatable in English, they refer to 'components' of ploughed earth after farming; the grotoni being dry clods, the malocchi wet. To retain this differential state the artist requires the 'devotional act' of watering the work every day.
Dayanita Singh, Interior Landscapes, 2015
Dayanita Singh’s Interior Landscapes (2015) comprises of a group of 16 silver gelatin prints, dislocated from any specific place or time. These intimately scaled, black and white photographs draw attention to an ancient and timeless landscape, treating rock formations, riverbeds and horizon lines as abstract, sculptural forms. Singh is interested in sequencing such images to expose new narrative possibilities and compositional relationships. The images in Interior Landscapes merge with the architecture of human intervention – stairs hug the form of an immense boulder, a small, brick hut punctuates a vast landscape and telephone pylons sketch lines into the sky.
Cornelia Parker, Black Path (Bunhill Fields), 2013
Fascinated with pavement cracks since her own childhood, Cornelia Parker poured liquid rubber into the cracks of the path in Bunhill Fields cemetery in London, on the route she took to school with her young daughter. Black Path (Bunhill Fields) (2013) presents an unexpected view of the small London cemetery where artist William Blake (1757–1827) is buried. As the artists explains: ‘When the rubber dried, I could lift the geography of the city’, this physical rendering of the negative space of the urban landscape is a bronze, black skeleton at our feet. In Blake’s best-known poem, Jerusalem, he sharply contrasts ‘mountains green’ with ‘dark satanic mills’.
Download Press Release

Photography: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation

This website places cookies on your computer to improve your experience. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. For more details, see our cookie policy.

Manage cookies

Accept all

Item added to cart

Sea, Soil, Stone: A Summer Show

Photography: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation

Sign up to our mailing list

Contact

Golden Square

Soho Square

Gallery Hours

Cookie preferences