Atmospheric Pressure

Living roots awaken in my head
Written by Séamus McCormack

Through experiments with environmental and temporal processes, Timo Kube balances ecological irregularity with the rigor of industrial exactness.  His practice investigates both materiality and the metaphysical, compelling us to look beyond the surface, even though we might be deflected.  For this exhibition at Inspection Pit, Kube considers the notion of atmosphere as both an environmental phenomenon and a conceptual framework – through explorations of material presence and perceptual experiences.

Upon entering Kube’s exhibition we are immediately immersed in a video and audio installation that intentionally disorients our senses.  Bog Body Abstractions (2024) magnifies the ecosystem of a bog that has been cultivated in the artist’s east London studio by projecting this matter in a seductive and enigmatic series of sequences.  To begin with, the images and sounds confound us, as the diversity of life-forms, insects and botanicals, are visualised in microscopic and uncanny detail.  The micro becoming macro, the unnoticed or unseen now visible.  Through vortex-like movements, exacerbated by the artist’s camera lens, this reality is abstracted through its intense increase in scale, and the disconnection between the imagery and the accompanying soundscape.  The ambient sounds of London’s ever-evolving urban landscape bring the ageless realm of the boglands into the present day, where echoes of airborne and ground vehicles reverberate with allusions of industrial progress.  By not repetitively overlaying the looped audio with the visuals new narratives are created.  The viewers’ cognitive process creates associations between sound and image, focusing on specific stimuli that may bring both memories and futuristic narratives to mind.

Through Kube’s wide-ranging use of materials, images and forms, one constant is how each of the works can resist and allure.  His large-scale paintings from the Weatherwork series are created from natural pigments such as volcanic rock which are painstakingly ground into his painting medium to create which, at first viewing, might be read as minimalist or monochrome.  However, the slight variations of tone, the almost visible gestures in the mark-making, the materiality of the pigments used, coupled with undulations of light, recall the expansiveness of skies or the vastness of seascapes.  His interest in meteorological phenomena is intensified in Untitled Weatherwork (Lead Tin Yellow #3) (2025), where he has worked with toxic lead tin yellow – a synthetic pigment used in European Old Master’s painting for luminous highlights, including the warm sunlit edges of clouds.  Their opacity and grand scale create windows to other atmospheric spaces, beckoning us to see beyond the limitations of surface in order to create new impressions.

New Order (2025) is made from a number of found Portland stone fragments that have been re-arranged to resemble its original presence.  Portland stone is a limestone extensively used in public buildings, but by presenting it horizontally and directly on the floor, the work resists monumentality.  Through the generative act of reconstruction or reconfiguring, and the title, New Order, generates ideas of permeance and shifting meaning.  One is immediately reminded of a fallen architecture, divided geographies, dismantled empires or an ancient geological formation.  The composition of irregular fractures creates a sense of division yet maintains its existence as one.  However, Kube creates a passage between two groupings of stones, inviting the viewer not to observe from the edges but to move inward and consider our relationship to the work.

Other floor pieces in various metals punctuate the gallery, some reflect their surroundings, whilst others deny.  This series of bronze, iron and zinc casts of a convex mirror titled From Earth (2024-2026), is produced through an elongated process of sanding and polishing to create individual surfaces.  By casting each from the same original object and giving them this uniform title, the artist makes references to their semblance as a group, yet their uniqueness is manifested through the subtle variations in their production and the material properties of each metal.

As featured in the video projection we first encountered in the exhibition, over the last number of years Kube has had an interest in the unique environments of the boglands.  In the artist’s studio he has recreated and nurtured miniature versions of bogs.  They take the form of found plastic containers that allow the living botanical and other organisms of the bogs to naturally develop.  Bogs are known for their preservation properties, so the passing of time is inherent in the work.  Arranged in a layered stack, they immediately resemble the natural strata of the earth, with each level suggesting sediment evoking geological time.  The artist often introduces various foreign or manufactured materials, such as paper and car-parts, to experiment with how this ecological system might react to these new agents.  There is an obvious link to the fossil fuel industry, pollution and how farming of such environments entangles the industrial with the organic.  However, we are also encouraged to appreciate the metamorphic and cyclical nature of these complex and evolving domains.  The work has echoes of Donald Judd’s stacked boxes, but Kube has used the modular forms as containers for the bog’s unruly landscapes that avoid being restricted into minimalist ideals.  Their aesthetic also can be compared to architectural models or storage for scientific research and allow for a multitude of ways to be presented as clusters or individually.

In an appropriate extension of the exhibition, in the surrounding gardens of the gallery Kube has created the site-specific installation Field Work (2026).  The artist has embedded a dozen water vessels into the grassy ground to create a constellation of apertures that mirror their surroundings which could be compared to a mise en abyme of infinite reflections.  The installation, which could be read as a companion piece to the From Earth series, can never be contained or grasped as one.  The surface of each pool reflects its surrounding environment and the sky above, evading our ability to fully visualise its contents and depth.  Each pool continually changes with shifting weather conditions or with elements such as foliage that are gradually and accidentally introduced over time.  One might describe this as a contamination of the purity in which we can perceive the work.  However, Kube actively embraces this evolving relationship to the environment which becomes an active agent.  The vessels will eventually recede back into the landscape, re-becoming as one with the earth or traces of our memory, much like ourselves in this circular rhythm.  In thinking of the artist’s labour in creating this work, I am immediately reminded of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging’, from his collection of poems in ‘Death of Naturalist’ (1966).  Heaney compares psychological or artistic progress with that of unearthing the soil: “through living roots awaken in my head”.  A desire to create meaning by excavating the mind and the earth and our interconnect-ness with the landscape.

The exhibition reflects on how the conditions of time, fluctuations in atmospheric, elemental or meteorological conditions can influence our perception.  Purposefully gradual and measured in register, manifested through their conception, production, and how they are encountered, the works are an invitation for us to contemplate diverging perceptions of transparency and solidity, gesture and pragmatism, disorder and orthodoxy.