Born in Swindon, once a thriving node of England’s industrial revolution, now occupied with empty and repurposed factories, Sturla thinks of landscape as marked, annotated, obsessively cross-referenced against the real. Following his interest in the impact post-industrial production has on ecological systems, Sturla’s starting point was how to shift the anthropocentric axis through which we view disaster. Fieldnotes (Plant Theatre) turns to the logic he encountered in J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine and the viewer finds themselves looking down onto the work, surveying and circling Sturla’s ceramic forms like a bird reading terrain. Patinated with graphite powder, the part engine, part architecture, part landscape sculpture inhabits sky and earth equally. Set in a shallow pool of water, the surrounding world is reflected back at us and the space above the work is folded into the way it is seen.

Han approaches the invasion of ecological systems differently, using found pieces of London Plane wood as the bodily nucleus of his series xoxo. Often considered the ultimate city tree, it is widely used in urban planning across continental Europe, thriving in harsh, polluted environments where other species fail. These trees are in fact a product of early globalisation: a botanical intermingling made possible by human trade and transportation. Arriving in Shanghai in 1902 with the French authorities, it became central to the French Concession district and by the 1950s, London Planes accounted for 87% of all street trees in Shanghai. The tree is historically synonymous with a colonial presence in China.
   Han traces the shape of the wood with a handwoven net of steel wire with intersections held together by small stainless steel beads. This glistening net follows the natural lines of the wood, mapping its knotted forms like osteotomy. Each work resembles a diagram of its own forces: vectors, pressure and movement extruded into three dimensions. The curvature of the knotted wood and the tension of the steel wire dictate how the suspended works fold in on themselves and reorganise the space around them.

Together, Han and Sturla propose that mapping is never neutral; it carries the weight of what has been extracted, displaced and lost. To understand how we have altered the world, we must first change the axis from which we look at it. The map, they suggest, has always been the first act of possession and to remake it is to ask whether the world can be held without being owned.