Unearthed is a campaigning yet enchanting combination of clay stop-frame animation and ceramics to magically create an illusion of life celebrating healthy soil teeming with amazing biodiversity. There is an aptness to using clay to investigate the hidden world of soil. Playing with scale, Jo Pearl makes the invisible visible as we zoom downwards, discovering ever smaller beings. Balletic characters – inspired by worms, bugs, fungal mycelium and bacteria - dance out of her imagination. This magnified biome beneath our feet, beguiles and whispers a plea for us to ‘Save Our Soil’.

 

Alongside the short film, ‘microscopic’ ceramic characters, some of which were created during the animation process, are shown as zoological specimens. Drawing on an historical tradition of explorers’ specimen collections pinned into entomology cases, the fauna displayed is strange. As though in suspended animation, we have time to examine and wonder at unexpected shapes and textures.

 

Kinetic ‘stabiles’ also breathe life into these ceramic beings with microbes, worms and mycelium spinning and swinging in space. Each teeters on delicately balanced brass and mild steel rods, expressing the precariousness of the fragile equilibrium in our soil’s biome.