In this exhibition, Lucia Babjakova together with young artists including Elai Inti, will be exploring the theme of saving and restoring urban nature. The current obsession with tidy low-cut lawns and constant grass mowing is destroying biodiversity around us.
‘To Save It, You Must See It’ is bringing attention to the beauty and life that lies in nature uncut, including verges and meadows and rewilded gardens in an urban environment, confronting the view that nature needs to be tidied up to be acceptable.
It invites the viewer to look closely and to see the beauty in ‘untidy’ nature and to bring attention to how many wildflowers and insects one sees every day.
The exhibition explores the theme of the war on nature and tries to increase understanding of the nature we can directly affect.
All around us people are at war with nature. On a macro scale with massive deforestation of rainforests and pollution of oceans; on a local scale with litter, destructive over-mowing and paving over of gardens. The irony of suburban garden orthodoxy even drives people to destroy grass and plants to fit plastic lawns and paving, because they don’t need maintenance, when one of the features of natural gardens is their low maintenance needs.
Perception is important in saving nature—if people just don’t see the litter or recognise the beauty and colour of plants, flowers, and animals then they will not hesitate to concrete it over and cut it down. A more acute and sensitive awareness is needed. We need to really see the nature around us so it can be saved.
Art is about ways of seeing and interpretation—nature needs our acute perception and direct action, and the first step is to learn to really see what is naturally around us.
Members of the public are invited to submit up to A5 size artwork or photographs of how they see nature around them, and it will be displayed on the ‘Nature Wall’ in the gallery.
