Jupiter Artland’s first major show of 2026 takes the topography of West Lothian as both its setting and its primary subject. The sprawling estate sits at a fascinating intersection of energy eras. Visitors stand surrounded by the nineteenth-century shale ‘bings’, adjacent to the landing site for the Forties North Sea oil pipeline, and powered by the venue’s own contemporary solar array. Extraction seizes upon this geographical coincidence to argue against the idea of linear industrial progress. Instead, it frames our relationship with energy as a continuous, repetitive cycle of wealth, technological hubris, and eventual residue.
It’s the sort of reflective, future-looking show that those familiar with Nicky and Robert Wilson’s art-filled project have come to expect. For those of you yet to drive or walk through the gates (there’s a bus stop just outside), the Wilsons have been steadily occupying the 120 acres of Jupiter Artland with world-class sculpture and gallery installations since 2009. You’ll find everyone from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Tai Shani represented, along with their unique philosophies on life, art, and everything else. It’s a partially wooded, partially manicured world of discovery.
I digress, however, back to Extraction.
Inside the beautifully ceilinged Ballroom Gallery, John Gerrard’s Flare (Oceania) functions as the exhibition’s visually arresting anchor. It is a monumental digital simulation of a gas flare taking the form of a national flag, hovering over an ocean. Unfolding continuously via game-engine graphics, it’s an attempt to remove any romance from our modern technological confidence, leaving behind a cold reflection on recurrence and environmental breakdown.
Jupiter Artland’s first major show of 2026 takes the topography of West Lothian as both its setting and its primary subject. The sprawling estate sits at a fascinating intersection of energy eras.
Set upon Gerrard’s beloved LED screen, it’s a frameless vista within which the sun rises and falls on a 12-hour cycle, inspired by the view from Tonga, one of the first nations in line for submersion if sea levels continue to rise unchecked. The sheer scale of the piece is certainly sufficient to divert your attention from the beautiful room it sits in, at least for a little while. The ghost of wood smoke from the Summer-extinguised open fire also adds a touch of unlooked-for immersion.
This clinical digital reality finds a counterweight in the tactile, physical works of John Latham and Carol Rhodes. In the Ballroom, Rhodes’ Untitled drawing brings something cooler, and undeniably pastoral to the space — whilst Lathan’s The N-U Niddrie Heart offers a meditation on decay, erosion and permanence. A pioneer of British conceptual art, Latham recognised the immense red shale heaps of West and Midlothian as ‘process sculptures’ back in the 1970s, collectively titling four of them Niddrie Woman. The six pillars of glass, literature and sand constituting the Heart certainly reward close inspection.
More Extraction in the Gallery
Moving to the Steadings Gallery (right beside Jupiter Artland’s excellent cafe), we find more from Latham and Rhodes, but here they find counterpoints from Siobhan McLaughlin and Marguerite Humeau.
Rhodes’s intimately scaled oil paintings offer an aerial perspective on ‘edgelands’—industrial zones, quarries, and reservoirs. She treats the environment as designed infrastructure, engineered by energy ideologies. McLaughlin, conversely, engages directly with the dirt. Her paintings are created using earth pigments harvested from the nearby Five Sisters Bing, drawing a direct material line between historical mining waste and contemporary ecological concerns.
Rhodes found science fiction in the red-shaled bings beyond Jupiter Arland’s walls, and this is reflected in the muted palette and otherworldly quality of her agricultural landscapes. McLaughlin’s Date of Exhaustion and Pioneer Species offer something grounded in raw, earthy tones and geometric shapes.
However, if, along with Latham, these works bring a historical backbone to this collection of contemporary responses, the Marguerite Humeau is attempting to look past the ruins. Her sculptural ecology envisions a future system based on symbiosis and collective intelligence rather than blunt taking. She asks a difficult, provocative question: what happens to the global metabolic system when humanity is no longer at the centre of it?
Arresting sculpture, obscure message
Her sculptural works are certainly attractive, though I do wonder if The Honey Holder and The Brewer might impress the viewer with their organic elegance more than they convey a story in themselves. Similarly, Latham’s entryway sculpture, constructed from two intersecting books, certainly arrests the attention, but might be a comment on all manner of things, including dereliction and the remnants of human endeavour. Yet even if these objects don’t give up their meaning easily, they add to the whole of Extraction and sit well within its purview.
However, if, along with Latham, these works bring a historical backbone to this collection of contemporary responses, the Marguerite Humeau is attempting to look past the ruins.
Overall, and aptly so, Extraction is a dense, analytical exhibition that resists the comfort of a tidy narrative. It certainly denies its audience a nostalgic look at our industrial prowess, but neither does it offer a utopian vision of a clean-energy salvation. It simply lays out the ideological structure of our energy systems and asks us to recognise our own complicity in the cycle.
This is a fine, if temporary, addition to the Jupiter Artland collection and certainly justifies another trip out if you know the place well. If you’ve yet to visit, then it’s a cherry on an exceptional, valuable cake. You might also stop to consider the monumental solar array the Wilsons have constructed to provide sustainable power for the site. At £150,000 they are certainly putting their money where their verdant, artistic hearts are. As an answer to Extraction, it’s certainly a sculpture with some considerable meaning, even if designed by an engineer who may not (or may!) consider themselves an artist.
Plus, it’s not every sculpture that will help charge your electric car. Whilst that’s happening, you can go check out Extraction…
Featured Image: john gerrard, Flare (Oceania) (2022) Photography by Sally Jubb
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