23 Jan – 13 April 2025
Soil: The World at our Feet, Somerset House’s 2025 landmark exhibition, unearths the wonder of soil, its unbreakable bond with life and the vital role it plays in our planet’s future. My sculptures will feature alongside the work of over 40 other artists, curated by The Land Gardeners, Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy; curator and writer May Rosenthal Sloan and Claire Catterall, Senior Curator at Somerset House. This campaigning show tells the story of soil’s vital and dramatic role in sustaining life on Earth, now and in the years to come.
The exhibition includes Unearthed – Mycelium (above) which has also been chosen as the poster image for the show. This sculpted ceramic frieze, representing a slice through topsoil revealing plants and fungi above ground and their connected roots and mycelium strands below – an entanglement of life, symbiotically conjoined.
SOIL: The World at our Feet, also features Pearl’s Oddkin, a specially created ceramic installation celebrating the microscopic companion species hidden in soil’s biome beneath our feet. Afterall, a cup of healthy soil contains around 200 billion bacteria, 20 million protozoa, 100,000 nematodes, 100,000 meters of fungi and probably one earthworm. Oddkin is a celebration of this amazing microscopic biodiversity. Pearl’s installation of ceramic nematodes, rotifers, bacteria, and protozoa appear like a constellation, each micro-organism hanging by a thread. Shadows amplify them, and parallax illusions make them appear to move and dance. Oddkin is intended to enchant, to encourage viewers to fall in love with the beings that live in soil, to recognise that they are our odd kin.
The work’s title alludes to critical thinker Donna Haraway’s coinage ‘making oddkin’, which describes the need for novel combinations of, and collaborations between humans and non-humans, without whom there is no food or life on earth.
Photos and films by Elsa Pearl
Jo Pearl Sculpture 