They resemble crumpled paper, cracks in an ice field or snapshots of another planet; in fact, they're a love letter to the ancestors. Dan Holdsworth's images look back to the great nineteenth-century landscape photographers – Carleton Watkins in Yosemite, Frank Hurley in the Antarctic – and, like them, he uses the most sophisticated technology he can find. The result is a biting sense of the miraculous.
Holdsworth has digitally reimagined masses of topographical data from the United States Geological Survey to create eerie renditions of culturally charged landscapes: Yosemite Park, Mount St Helens volcano, the Grand Canyon. The work involved is astonishing – there's a glass box here of the data required to 'map' 0.23 square metres of Yosemite, and it covers 6,160 sheets of paper – but the outcome is a beautiful paradox. The data tracks climate and land change, so what looks like untouched terrain is in fact the exact opposite.
If there is a problem, it's that the work is all so aesthetically pleasing. Really, if this what our effect on the Earth looks like, need we worry? After all, every hill and canyon is the result of some long-ago natural disaster: peer back far enough and there's scenic carnage everywhere. From Capa to Goya and back to the Bayeux Tapestry and beyond, artists have taken destruction as inspiration; the trouble is, that complicated legacy ends with the last artist. Holdsworth's images look like missives from outer space, but perhaps he should have called the exhibition 'Unnatural Disasters'. After all, it's not aliens we need to fear.