The open-air art space near Edinburgh Jupiter Artland is hosting its spring exhibition: Extraction comprises work by Carol Rhodes, john gerrard, Marguerite Humeau, Siobhan McLaughlin and John Latham, and explores the cultural, psychological and environmental legacies of energy systems.
The artists’ practices are presented in dialogue with Jupiter Artland’s unique West Lothian landscape – where traces of three energy eras exist simultaneously: the nineteenth-century shale oil industry, the twentieth-century North Sea petroleum economy and contemporary renewable infrastructure.
Rather than looking at energy history as a linear progression, Extraction reveals a repetitive cycle of belief, optimism and inevitability, with each energy era producing material wealth, cultural identity and technological confidence, then eventually becoming residue, memory or monument. While debates around energy transition are dominated by technological narratives and political urgency, the exhibition instead investigates and considers the emotional and ideological structure of energy systems – labour, identity and landscape – without nostalgia or triumphalism.
