Aesthetics of Extraction: Jupiter Artland

In the quiet of the Ballroom Gallery, the persistent low electrical hum of the GPU rig supporting john gerrard’s Flare (Oceania) (2022), emanating from behind the screen as a gentle vibration, sounds timeless and ominous. The work’s presence arrests the room’s opulence on entry. The Ballroom is a space with a high ornate ceiling which exudes grandeur and is part of the private Bonnington House at the entrance of the Jupiter Artland sculpture park. Against this backdrop, gerrard’s real-time digital simulation presents a morose and loaded image of a gas flare burning in the form of a flag, alluding to the relationship between extractivism, the energy economy, geopolitics, and national interests. 

The flagpole projects out of seascape based on photographs by activist and artist Uili Lousi of the South Pacific Ocean near Tonga, among the world’s most vulnerable nations to climate change, facing threats from rising sea-levels , ocean erosion, and acidification. gerrard’s real-time game engine-based simulations, presented on large LED screens, are custom-programmed generative digital artworks which probe the conditions of contemporary environmental politics. There is an implied irony in the hum, as the work critiquing fossil energy is powered by an array of solar panels also electrifying the rest of Jupiter’s site. The panels are situated by the car park on arrival to the sculpture garden, joining the shale bings and the Forties pipeline as monuments of energy infrastructure embedded in the surrounding landscape. 

Flare’s spectacle is counterbalanced with conceptual artist John Latham’s sculpture The N-U Niddrie Heart (1991) installed in the opposite side of the gallery. From the 1970s, Latham became deeply inspired by the West and Midlothian ’shale bings’ – waste monuments of the shale mining industry in Scotland from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In an expression of the Artist Placement Group’s ethos that “the context is half the work,” Latham insisted the red waste mounts be treated as process sculptures, naming four bings near the town of Winchburgh Niddrie Woman. The sculpture presented in the Ballroom Gallery extends this conceptual territory and functions as the heart of this female figure. Together, they suggest a cycle of material interaction, death and rebirth, and the Earth as a Mother, through a rhythmic installation of sand, glass, and distressed and reassembled books. Featured volumes, with titles such as Vanished Species and The Pregnancy Survival Manual, suggest decay, erosion, and permanence through material timescales. 

gerrard and Latham’s monumental works are interrupted and mediated by Carol Rhodes’s aerial view soft drawing of the landscape of West Lothian. In her approach to industry-altered landscape as designed infrastructure, Rhodes reflects on the ways in which extraction reshapes land and becomes inseparable from its makeup and mythology. Her Untitled (c.2005-7) drawing is believed to have been inspired by another shale waste site – the Five Sisters Bing. The three artists in the space converge on representations of landscape altered by extraction and energy infrastructure, triangulating a narrative of image, matter, and aerial perspective to connect energy politics, material transformation as alternative timelines, and the interrelation of land and industry. 

The second part of the exhibition continues in the Steadings Gallery, a short walk from the Ballroom, situated at Jupiter’s ’agora’ before entering the sculpture garden proper. In the encounter with this second space, the exhibition starts to feel like it is built and presented in three descending layers. From the elevated, light filled ballroom, moving to the dark and cosy entrance of the Steadings Gallery, and concluding with a descent into the Gallery’s lowered inner chamber. Each phase of the show feeling closer to the ground and to the substrate at the core of the show. Part II feels decidedly different and shifts the tone towards a darker, gloomier register. Entering the space feels like burrowing underground and this atmosphere is suggested by the snug first chamber and amplified by the dusty brown terracotta paint coating the walls. 

John Latham’s work Face to Face (1985) extends the sculptural language of The N-U Niddrie Heart (1991) in a more minimal register with a single assemblage of two books with canvas, paint, and wood, further prodding temporal linearity. It’s placement positions the artist’s cosmological views in conversation with three samples of shale rocks at three different points in its life cycle, displayed to the left. At the same time, Latham’s work is juxtaposed with Siobhan McLaughlin’s textural paintings Date of Exhaustion (2025) and Pioneer Species (2025), mounted on the right. McLaughlin’s works are made using pigments gathered from the Five Sister Bings, therefore incorporating the red waste material turned landscape monument with its own ecosystem, directly onto the canvas. The paintings layer textural landscapes with images of industrial extraction and plants to suggest the sedimentary nature of cycles of extraction and its impact on biodiversity. 

Stepping down into the lower and larger chamber of The Steadings Gallery feels like entering a shrine to the sculptural works of Marguerite Humeau. The Brewer (2023), The Honey Holder (2023), and The Guardian of Termitomyces (2023) are arranged on an elevated oval platform in the centre of the room creating an eerie multidimensional installation of organic materials, soft and reflective surfaces, and shadow play. 

The organic forms sit in a dynamic composition, and I’m saddened to discover from the minimal wall text that The Brewer (2023) and The Honey Holder (2023) are supposed to be accompanied by an original soundtrack by Norwegian saxophonist and performance artist Bendik Giske. Faced with the misgivings of tech maintenance at exhibitions, I’m left to fantasise how a soundtrack might elaborate on the mystic feel of Humeau’s work. The concert of shapes, materials, and shadows suggests a systemic reading of an ecosystem and solidifies the metabolic dimension of energy systems, which the show has consistently implied so far. Humeau’s sculptural stage brings a feeling of movement and interaction which is arrested by a painting from Carol Rhodes on the back wall. Deposits (2009) continues Rhodes’ engagement with aerial landscapes deepening the feel of the drawing we encounter in the ballroom with a pastel-coloured oil landscape here, which also establishes a resonant dialogue with McLaughlin’s paintings across The Steading Gallery. 

Moving through the three phases of the exhibition, I encounter various stages of performance of the show’s central argument, led from image to matter and transitioning from the politically to the metabolically implied. The thesis that the curatorial text describes of energy as belief, residue, and monument is as much performed conceptually through the works, as through the embodied experience of moving through the exhibition. 

Bilyana Palankasova, PhD Researcher at University of Glasgow

Extraction: john gerrard, Marguerite Humeau, Siobhan McLaughlin, John Latham, Carol Rhodes
11 Apr – 26 Jul
Jupiter Artland
Bonnington House Steadings, Wilkieston, Edinburgh, EH27 8BY