According to the blurb, ‘Hinterlands is a group exhibition that invites us to consider our relationship with the land and its ecosystems’. It features work from Michelle Allen, Uma Breakdown, Jo Coupe, Laura Harrington, Emily Hesse, Alexandra Hughes, Mani Kambo, Dawn Felicia Knox, Sheree Angela Matthews, Anne Vibeke Mou, Sabina Wallis and Foundation Press.

There were two installations which particularly struck me, neither of them featured in the picture at the top of this post, demonstrating that I’m not a brilliant blogger.

Laura Harrington’s Fieldworking was a 2020 video installation featuring a group of artists spending time with an ecologist in the Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve. Something about the combination of the familiarity of a rainy walk in the middle of nowhere with the meditative pace of the video gave it a slightly trippy quality. It made me think about the passage of time, and how the human perspective on time is bounded by our experience and the length of our lives. To the extent that they have one, the perspective on time experienced by much longer-lived organisms like trees or bogs would be vastly different. It was a novel way of reminding me of the need to ‘zoom out’ sometimes from everyday concerns, and see how trivial they really are in the wider scheme of things.

Dawn Felicia Knox’s The Felling was a 2022 installation, which included a video component. She had taken videos of different parts of the local suburb of Felling, once very industrialised, showing the natural succession of plants on the industrial sites. Two of these films were projected simultaneously onto makeshift screens and sheets at odd angles, meaning that the images were broken over multiple surfaces and the two films were, in part, overlaid on one another in interesting ways. This made me think about perspectives on the natural world. It reminded me of how nature isn’t static, but is constantly shifting and changing, even if we can’t always see it.

The exhibition is presented in its own typeface—Hinterlands—designed by Foundation Press. I wasn’t initially very taken by this, until I realised that each letter form has multiple versions, each progressing from a fairly traditional letter form to one covered in extensive plant growth… which is clever.

’Hinterlands’ continues at the Baltic until 30 April.