Kurt Jackson:Biodiversity at the Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery
1 March - 7 July
A passionate environmentalist Kurt Jackson's work actively calls attention to the beauty, complexity, and increasing fragility of the natural world.
In Biodiversity, Jackson opens windows onto different locations across the UK and explores the spectrum of plant and animal life found there. From train tracks to ancient woodland, peat bogs to urban streams, ecological processes come under the scrutiny of his painterly eye.
Through paintings, sculpture, and mixed media works, Jackson shows what an ecologically rich world we still live in, but also how things are changing – themes which are explored in depth in our newly reimagined Nature Gallery.
Kurt Jackson is an artist unconstrained by any specific style, method, or material. His practice ranges from visceral seascapes and landscapes which plunge the view directly into the sea or soil, to sculpture, film and printmaking. This exhibition also includes intriguing collages using found objects. His subject, however, is almost exclusively the natural environment and evoking a sense of place, something he’s explored with artist residencies on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, at the Eden Project, and at Glastonbury Festival. A sense of place has always been pivotal to Jackson’s working practice; the geographic focus behind each piece is crucial whether a specific chosen river, a route or a particular habitat in this country or abroad.
The varied collection of work which makes up Biodiversity extorts the viewer to look again at the natural riches that surround us, even in the most unexpected of places. For example, collages such as Bioblitz of Vauxhall Bridge Road, London explore manmade environments by combining found rubbish with plant specimens and sketch-like paintings, demonstrating Jackson’s zoologist training and artists’ observational skills. The work is made both in situ, allowing for an environmental involvement through chance and serendipity, and in the studios.
Jackson’s ability to capture nature at its most sublime and monumental is on display in canvases like A Cornish Bestiary and Three heathers and two of gorse, but it’s taxonomy – cataloguing of species and layering of biological detail – that characterises this group of works. For example, a field of poppies might look like a monoculture at first, until Jackson tells us that three different types of poppies are present in a field which contains 154 flower species in total.
The cataloguing continues. Shells, fungi, sea anemones, moths, beetles, seaweeds and moss all come under the artist’s microscope, forming a creative time-capsule of biodiversity in particular places, at a particular time.
By urging visitors to stop and look, appreciate and marvel, Jackson is using the greatest tool at his disposal to encourage us all to cherish and protect the earth for future generations.
Born in rural Dorset and going on to study Zoology at Oxford University, it was always clear that the natural world would be Jackson’s subject matter. While at Oxford he attended courses at Ruskin College of Art and after leaving university he travelled extensively, painting wherever he went. His choice of West Cornwall as a place to put down roots and start a family spoke of a desire to experience nature on the edge, and his large scale plein-air paintings of the local landscape and coastline have come to encapsulate contemporary Cornish landscape painting.
Jackson is an Honorary Fellow of Oxford University and of Arts University Plymouth. He has an honorary doctorate from Exeter University, is an academician at the RWA.
In 2024 was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh for his contribution to the arts and poetry and an Honorary Commodore by the National Maritime Museum Falmouth.
“Daily, during my time spent making art outdoors, I notice the life around me – the plants and animals that share these places with me. When I start to focus on the minutiae of my surroundings, that rich tapestry of life above, around, and at my feet that coexists in its myriad webs, I become keenly aware of the ecological differences.”
“Depending on where I am making art at any one time, I am struck by the beauty, complexity, richness or paucity; the small differences and subtle variations, the losses and rarities and sometimes unfortunately the bland barrenness of the natural world there.”
“I have turned my attention to the biodiversity of our country and made this series of works to reflect this subject matter. Each piece results from an engagement with a location or group of animals and plants.’
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