After Nature: Curated By Ben Tufnell
13th September, 2025 – 25th October, 2025
CLOSE, Hatch Beauchamp
Taunton TA3 6AE
A new group show in Somerset, curated by Ben Tufnell, explores how artists across generations respond to nature in an era of ecological change.
SOMERSET, England — This September, CLOSE will present After Nature, a group exhibition curated by Ben Tufnell that brings together a broad range of artists whose work responds to the natural world. The show runs from September 13 through October 25 at the gallery’s Somerset location.
The exhibition includes internationally recognised names such as Richard Long and David Nash, alongside a younger generation of artists including Aimee Parrott, Alastair and Fleur Mackie, Nissa Nishikawa and Fred Sorrell. Their works span sculpture, painting, ceramics, drawing and photography. Rather than offering a single viewpoint, After Nature reflects on the many ways artists are engaging with the environment — how they work with natural forms and processes, and how they navigate the idea of coming “after” nature in an age of ecological change.
Courtesy the artist and CLOSE Ltd.
One part of the exhibition looks at artists who incorporate materials such as mud, minerals and ash, or rely on processes like gravity and evaporation. Long contributes a major mud installation; Drury presents a wall piece made from ash and dust. Nash’s pastel studies explore subtle tonal shifts, while Onya McCausland uses ochre pigments sourced from mine waste.
A second section focuses on perception — how we see and interpret the natural world. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg presents works that attempt to mimic the perspective of bees and other pollinators. Nissa Nishikawa fires ceramics using materials gathered from the land surrounding the gallery. New works will also debut by Magnus Hammick, Simon Hitchens, Parrott and Lotte Scott.
The show arrives at a time of growing concern over the climate crisis, even as some political leaders remain dismissive. “While ecological and ecocritical discourse is ever more insistent that there is no distinction between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ (that to be human is ‘to be ecological’ in philosopher Timothy Morton’s words), extreme weather events are increasingly commonplace, and the current US administration questions the reality of climate change and has announced an intention to double down on fossil fuel extraction,” the curators note.
Tufnell sees this exhibition not as an argument, but as an invitation. “Artists have long addressed the complexities of these issues, often quietly and non-polemically, but with subtle power and insistence,” he writes. “By making work that addresses the ways we understand the human/nature dialectic and by interrogating the ways in which culture can represent and reflect the environment, art can perhaps offer a nuanced understanding of our present predicament.”
In that spirit, After Nature asks what it means to live in a time when nature is both threatened and essential, and how art might help us see that more clearly.
After Nature: Curated Ben Tufnell opens on the 13th of September until the 25th of October 2025 at CLOSE
©2025 CLOSE
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