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Opening hours:
Monday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm
Sunday, 11am - 4pm

How should we relate to nature? As recently as fifty years ago the anthropocentric way of looking purely through the lens of human outcomes was the mainstream assumption, at least in western traditions. Yet the growing consensus around the effect of a history of exploiting and abusing nature has altered how we see the relationship. Timothy Morton has suggested how ‘putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman’. Rather, we should see humans as just one species among many in the ecosystem, and hold that the natural environment is intrinsically valuable independent of what benefit accrues to people.
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Art is good at evoking, amplifying, and provoking in response to such shifts in perception.
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Bournemouth’s former Debenhams – a doomed cathedral of sorts to the society of consumption which lies behind the Anthropocene - is an appropriate place to reflect on how we relate to nature. And there’s plenty of potential to read concerns about the future of nature into the work of the twelve artists gathered here.

- Paul Carey Kent, exhibition curator

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