Face it

The thing about Dan and Heather’s works is that they confront you head-on and ask, “what’s your relationship with the world around you?” There’s nowhere to hide from them.   I can’t decide if they're passively aggressive (like Rothko) or aggressively passive (like Kahlo) - either way, they make you stop and re-examine your sense of self and your place in the world.

This is not to be misunderstood - there is peace, serenity and beauty in their works.  Actually, I wouldn’t mind living inside one of their wondrous foliage-filled installations for a while.  It’s just that their pieces have the potential to leave you altered...and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, isn’t that part of what art is meant to do?

Dan and Heather (more commonly known as Harvey and Ackroyd) are a UK-based artists’ collective who have been successfully collaborating together for the past 21 years.  They have worked with grass seed, clay and animal bones in the past and often investigate the interplay between dichotomies of material and form, organic and inorganic, nature and man.

As part of their extensive and experimental oeuvre, they have transformed disused churches, prominent city buildings and now the Khoj courtyard, into grassy havens; they have displayed whale and camel skeletons covered in crystallized salt particles in museums and abandoned houses; and they have burnt a polar-bear bone into ashes, collected the carbon remains and grown striking diamonds from it.

Inspired by the visionary artist Joseph Beuys, Heather and Dan have also collected hundreds of acorns from Beuys’s seminal work “7000 Oaks” and grown around 250 saplings of their own.  In a way, they are continuing to explore some of the questions he began asking such as:  “Can art have an impact on socio-political thinking?”

The difference in today’s climate is that one can no longer ignore the environmental issues at hand.  “It’s not an issue,”  Heather says, “it’s too big to be an issue – it’s every level of our being, how we drink coffee in the morning, how we drive to work – it’s completely systemic.”  Inevitably, Heather and Dan have become more politicised over the last decade and often feel that civilized society is increasingly isolating itself from nature.

Their portraiture works look at this dysfunctional relationship between the man-made and the natural, but also explore notions of permanence, mortality and temporality.  While at Khoj, they have photographed local women in Khirkee village.  They will then grow grain onto canvas while projecting an image of the human face onto it, so that it is captured by the chlorophyll pigment within the cells.  Such images may only last for a few days, at most a few weeks, before they fade away.

So there you have it - growth, revival, transformation, death, decay – all in one work.

And working with living material means that their work also draws upon ("almost osmotically") the histories, narratives and even mythologies associated with buildings or localities in which they grow their installations.  I for one am intrigued to see what the significance of their latest barley seed works done at Khoj will take on - and I can’t help but wonder how their works may add another layer of understanding to our perception of the world around us.