Artist unearths the vital essence of soil

Natalie Taylor’s hands are the first thing you notice about her, as she explains her passion for soil, seeds and the amazing fecundity of our planet. They are strong, with broad stubby fingers and short fingernails, and the skin is healthy and pink with traces of soil in the folds.

Taylor has just completed a short stint as first artist-in-residence under the aegis of North Light Arts, a local arts charity in Dunbar. The town was the birthplace, in 1838, of John Muir, one of the world’s best-known conservationists, and chief among Muir’s concerns was the importance of soil. This year also happens to be the UN-designated International
Year of Soils.

These two facts are connected, for our planet is ailing under pressure from industrialisation and population increase, leading to a depletion in soil health because of erosion, fertilisers and insecticides. Soil, like air and water, is a fundamental of life; without it, there would be no plants, animals or, indeed, any humans.

To illustrate the chemical and biological complexity of soil, Taylor has drawn a Buddhist-style
mandala, depicting its multiple inter-relationships and hierarchies. Its centre features potassium, nitrogen and single-celled organisms, while its outer ring represents humans and their main food source in the form of large supermarkets.

This delicate work has been painted using soil pigments from a variety of locations around East Lothian. In general, the darker the pigment, the healthier the soil, however, one third of the ring has been “washed away” — its complex lines and relationships breaking off in forlorn trails and runs. The message here is clear: the weave of life is breaking down, rapidly.

Taylor’s work takes many forms, including small, detailed watercolours, cast bronze sculpture and digitally woven tapestry. The last grouping includes Force of Nature, which is a reworking of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues’s 1585 painting, Young Daughter of the Picts, showing a naked and tattooed woman. But, like most of Taylor’s work, there’s a twist — the face has been replaced by a skull, indicating that at the heart of de Morgues’s utopian vision of nature, there is now a dystopian reality.

Elsewhere, there are small sculptures representing severed digits as chitted potatoes and images of chitted potatoes that look like bizarrely deformed embryos.

Taylor’s work is quietly angry and it should be, yet ultimately, despite the force of the message in this show, it never feels hectoring, remaining effective despite, not because of, its moral weight.

Until June 21