The Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh is showing an exhibition marking 300 years since the birth in the city of James Hutton, who became known as the father of modern geology and caused a major shift in western thinking about the ground beneath our feet. Thirty contemporary artists, designers, and makers have contributed to the display, in the Gardens’ Inverleith House Gallery, which partners their new pieces with historic works.
Earth Matters is billed as ‘a multidisciplinary salute to soil’, and salutes Hutton’s tercentenary by taking Hutton’s precepts of soil as one of the most powerful agents for supporting life and storing carbon: dynamic, complex, alive with fungi, bacteria and other organisms.
Soil has also been a medium for art through the centuries around the world, and the Garden’s arts producer Amy Porteous has worked alongside founder of Design Exhibition Scotland Susanna Beaumont to curate a meeting of art and plant science, mycology and horticulture that explores humanity’s relationships with land, addressing human intervention in the past as well as current concerns.
Hutton farmed in the Scottish Borders, and explored the country’s rock formations, developing his theory of unconformity, which led him to his proposal that the planet is not a fixed creation but has always been a living, shifting, entity – at a time when Edinburgh was the centre of Enlightenment, prompting us to look at the world in different ways – a trait shared by artists. Susanna says, ‘Through art, craft and design dating from the 18th century to the present-day, our ambition is that Earth Matters will illuminate the power and vitality of earth, while paying tribute to the father of modern geology.’
Among the artists featured in the exhibition are Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Joan Eardley, Ilana Halperin, James Hutton himself, John Kay, Sekai Machache (whose work is pictured at top), Carol Rhodes, Alberta Whittle and Fiona Young, whose work is pictured above. It is organised in collaboration with the James Hutton Institute and forms part of the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, RSA200 and James Hutton Tercentenary 2026 celebrations. A series of talks and supporting events continues throughout the exhibition’s run.
