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The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all
Wendell Berry

Down to Earth is a collection of work by the group, Nine Artists, with a focus on the concepts and materiality of earth/soil. The two exhibitions, at Oh! Art, Oxford House, London and in the Hay Gallery, Colchester, draw attention to ‘seen but not seen’ aspects of earth, environment and place.

In this new body of work, Heather Alexander-Wallis, Caroline Halliday and Janet French use the earth itself, its pigments or plants, to make prints, paintings and sculpture; Eleonora Knowland creates curved, cut and stitched canvases which represent the land she works and relates to as an artist/ farmer; and Lizzie Cannon, often using textiles, reconfigures minute organic growths, ‘camouflaging’ them to the conditions of the urban landscape.

Annie Spinster’s scripted ecosystem and Maxine Harraway’s photographs with texture and pattern, investigate the systems and cycles of interaction between people and place, through marks on the land, or our real time movement in it.

Installation is the format for Aisling Roycroft and Amanda Francis, who work flexibly with the space of the exhibition, creating a dialogue between urban found objects, the artist and the site.

Robert Smithson said, "the history of art is a minor blip in our dealings with the earth". Nine Artists have taken "our dealings" with earth/soil and place to create a diversity of artworks exploring this fragile, symbiotic relationship.

Although the work in Down to Earth will engage both other artists and the public in the continuing and important dialogue about the environment and ecological issues, the responses of Nine Artists to earth are essentially as artists. They invite the viewer to look at earth in a different way, to disrupt common assumptions about this most basic site and material.

Members of Nine Artists have been in many group and solo exhibitions over the last five years, including Colchester, Brighton Festival, Whitstable and London, and Lizzie Cannon has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, 2007. Now they are combining their ideas in this first group show.

info@nineartists.org