Dirt, Death, and Decay: Soil’s Place in Contemporary Art

Lengthy efforts are often made to preserve art in a frozen “original” state, to stall nature’s processes of deterioration, but artists are creating works intended to decay, (d)evolve, and embrace death. When soil occupies the white cube through the works of contemporary artists Precious Okoyomon, Daniel Lie, and Delcy Morelos, notions of mortality and the passing of time are inescapable. In their hands, soil no longer functions as a medium for humans to tame and exercise grand, almost divine, control over, but a reminder that nature’s cycles of rot and regeneration are inevitable. By embracing soil and its abject reminders of death, contemporary artists are proposing alternative ways of relating to nature that subvert settler-colonial modalities.