The most resonant aspect of Tue Greenfort’s exhibition can’t actually be seen there. In a corner of the gallery, five burlap bags are silently pregnant with activity. Germinating away in coffee grounds ‘mainly recycled from the SLG café’, are oyster mushrooms. The associations of fungi and growth, though, cut two ways. Elsewhere in the show, on a supermarket shelving unit – that refers less than delightedly to commercial food production – are multiple copies of the 1972 eco-manual ‘The Limits to Growth’.
Equivocal, too, are many of the aptly named Danish artist’s doctrinaire works. Pinned-up recycling bags, for instance – orange ones from Kensington and Chelsea, clear ones from Hillingdon, etc – refer not only to our environmental responsibility but to the ineffectual patchwork of services resulting from Thatcher-era privatisation.
Greenfort’s exhibition focuses itself on mankind and nature’s uneasy union as speakers pump in sounds from exhaust-choked Peckham Road, disrupting the rarefied calm. In the show’s centrepiece, the gallery is melancholically invaded by a blast from the past. Rich in woodsy imagery of fish, fowl and flora, a printed replica of the intricate marquetry (originally laid onto the SLG’s floor) has been ruffled-up and partly wrapped around three semi-collapsed hexagonal tables – the shape referencing the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, whose ‘Spaceship Earth’ now feels on collision course. But hey, don’t cry – at least there’s mushrooms for lunch.