Imagine opening up a holiday gift from a close friend to find a duck inside the wrapping! BALTIC’s press information doesn’t indicate whether the duck was living or dead, but apparently Charles darwin was sent just such a souvenir by the young naturalist,

Alfred Russell Wallace, who later assisted the scientist in developing his Origins of Species. According to BALTIC curator and the brains behind A Duck For Mr darwin, Alessandro Vincentelli, ‘with the artists here you’ve got the same excitement and wonder that intrigued darwin, with his corresponding with people from all over the world.’ Indeed, the three artists that chatted with me about their work - Ben Jeans Houghton, Marcus Coates and Mark Dion - are entertaining, thoughtful communicators, clearly fascinated by their subjects.
‘I used to spend all my time on my bike going down back lanes’, says Northumbria University trained artist Ben Jeans Houghton when I asked him where he sources his beautifully arranged bric-a-brac. ‘But also abandoned buildings.’ The intrepid urban explorer has built a shed/greenhouse type space within BALTIC’s Level 3 gallery, where visitors will be able to observe him ‘reorganising and archiving everything.’ The artist expects the inspiration for drawings, books and films to emerge from his gathering and sorting activities: ‘all of this informs my practice outside, so it’s like a research residency.’ Visitors are also invited to re-enact darwin and Wallace’s postal relationship by sending one of Jeans Houghton’s postcards to a friend, who can then mail a curious object back to the artist for possible inclusion in the show.
BALTIC has captured that traditional, museum archive feel within the whole exhibition, with mysterious temporary rooms breaking up the large space. Enter one dark doorway to find Tania Kovats’ new piece entitled ‘Worm’, a fully functional and gradually changing wormery, filled with wriggly live specimens. Another space holds the strange, self-referencing world of Charles Avery’s ‘Islanders’ – perhaps a Galapagos for our postmodern times - where objects, drawings and text interact, shedding light on possible meanings. Further partitions provide room to view the work of north-east based Marcus Coates, an artist who has gained international renown with his gently humorous, shamanistic performances – and actually got to travel to the Galapagos Islands thanks to a Gulbenkian Foundation award. ‘I only had about five days on the inhabited island, so not long… I made a TV report for their news channel.’ Perhaps surprisingly, Galapagos is inhabited by 30-40,000 people. But rather than blend in with the locals, Coates took on the form of a native bird, using a striking cardboard costume. In the film, the artist-as-bird makes a touching investigation of human culture: ‘He can’t work out why there’s inequality between humans, can’t work out racism, can’t work out graves, crucifixes, and can’t work out why kids eat with spoons.’ A second film deals with the melancholy lives of endangered Galapagos tortoises that may not adapt quick enough to survive the growing human influence on the islands, recalling the exhibition’s subtitle, Evolutionary Thinking and the Struggle to Exist.

While the exhibition does not shy away from the negative impact of the explorer’s instinct, the ‘Victorian spirit of adventure’, as Vincentelli puts it, is continued with American artist Mark Dion’s installation. A collection of equipment – butterfly nets, specimen jars, flower-presses, travellers’ trunks, canvas, oars – that could have been used by the lesser known Victorian naturalists Bates, Spruce and Wallace, is artfully arranged on an imported sandy beach. Dion travelled extensively around the Amazon to research his piece, and ‘I read all their books, which are a great pleasure to read… one by Henry Bates called The Naturalist on the River Amazons is really one of the best travel books a naturalist has ever written.’ Dion’s work enjoys a favourable response from scientists, ‘but it’s very hard to find an artist who knows even the Laws of Thermodynamics or some really basic thing about science.’ Perhaps Dion’s display, and the engaging way in which BALTIC has carried out its concept, will inspire future artists and scientists to find out more about the other’s world.
Becky Hunter.

Becky Hunter’s in-depth interview with artist Mark Dion can be found at http://whitehotmagazine.com

A Duck For Mr darwin: Evolutionary Thinking and the Struggle to Exist, BALTIC, Gateshead Quays, until September 20. 0191 478 1810; http://balticmill.com

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