Continuing with our Reading: An Open Gallery blog post series, today I want to talk about art experiences that can be had relating to the concept of ‘nature.’

In Reading Museum, there is an incredible room called The Box Room. With an emphasis on touching and handling objects from the past, this installation causes viewers to ask questions about the origins, meaning, histories and social resonances of things. The Box Room contains many objects that can be handled and touched. Highly charged as a context itself, the Museum is certainly not a neutral territory in which to encounter things. Rather, it is a space dedicated to the preservation and inventorying of objects. It is a space which categorises, enshrines and protects the detritus of the world in such a way that we are forced to value or reconsider it… stuff… the meaning of it/stuff. So the Museum itself changes the way we encounter its content, and the ability to touch the things in the museum adds a whole new dimension to that experience… at times, in The Box Room, it feels as though you are handling history itself. Or at least, one version of history.

The Seed in Reading Museum Box Room, installation, artist – various. Located in the Town Hall, Blagrave Road, Reading

Here I am, experiencing The World’s Largest Seed at first hand. I was filled with enormous wonder in the presence of The Seed. It is an amazing thing to be able to wander off a public street into a room where you can hold the World’s Largest Seed. Encountering it in a quiet room that smells of cardboard filing systems is a somewhat abstract way of encountering Nature in Reading, but there is no other context in which one may find or meet a Palm Seed given the non-tropical meteorology of this region. But in some ways that is the point.

The Seed in The Box Room is not about Nature as the thing we encounter when we walk through wild places or observe the goings-on in the garden; it is about Our Relationship To Nature… It is about the colonial nature of Museums; the way that museums hunt and discover exotic and fantastical things and then house them in wildly fetishistic spaces. The Giant Seed in The Box Room is somehow about the prizing and fantasticalising (is that a word? It should be) of Nature. It is unlikely, for instance, that one may be able to handle A Very Typical Sunflower Seed from The Berkshire Region in The Museum. Unless, of course, you were looking at objects in The Mundane Appreciation Museum. But that’s another art project altogether… For the purposes of The Reading Museum Box Room, we can safely assume that – in the great tradition of museums everywhere – the contents we encounter will be Fantastic and Incredible.

The Giant Seed, for what it’s worth, truly fulfils these criteria and one should go just to be able to experience the steroid-fuelled, massive imaginative injection of Nature Love that it suggests, whilst cradling its suggestive, shiny form in both hands. It is possible to just submit to the wonder.

If Ultimate experiences are not your thing, there are other, more ephemeral Nature works in and around the city. Take for instance this lovely work:

Yellow and Blue ephemeral, time-based performance work, light, air, plant material, sunshine, locations: Various, artist unknown.

This piece is breathtakingly beautiful. Taking up whole swathes of space with gently floating-down leaves, carpets of rustling plant-material and skyscapes of dazzling colour, it evokes the changing seasons of nature. The piece is available to view only between the end of September and the start of November and is best viewed on sunny days. It has an amazing sonic component; a sort of rustling, skittering, windy-leaf-torn paper noise of trees-in-being.

The Giant Seed will be available for viewing indefinitely; Yellow and Blue will only be available for viewing in the immediate, short-term future and again, next year.