ONE MAN AND HIS ISLAND

At the grand old age of 241, the Royal Academy is letting its hair down. After allowing itself to be spattered with red wax by Anish Kapoor, it now welcomes a gaggle of artists with a green tinge. For the second GSK Contemporary show, “Earth: Art of a changing world”, Burlington House will have a giant molecular structure growing out of its venerable facade. The RA's new exhibitions director, Kathleen Soriano, gave us a sneak preview of the show, and as she flipped through her laminated folder, the images that lingered longest were the photographs by Antti Laitinen (pictured, "It's My Island I") .

At first glance they are just gorgeous shots of the sea. On closer inspection there is an island, the kind you see in cartoons. Laitinen, who is Finnish, made the island himself, lugging sandbags out into the Baltic in a rowing boat for six weeks solid: a Sisyphus on sea. “Yes, it was like that,” Laitinen says. “I think life is quite a Sisyphean struggle in general, but I don’t consider it a bad thing at all.”

The island didn’t survive for long. Storms blew in, Laitinen made running repairs, but the weather won the battle. All that remains are these serenely intriguing pictures, only loosely related to climate change (“I don’t like to underline anything”). They have been shown before, though not in a gallery this big. How do people react? “It seems that many people would like to have their own island.” To a British viewer, John Donne comes inescapably to mind. “Yes, I know the line,” Laitinen says, “and I think it is true. No man is an island, but man can try to build one himself.”

"Earth: Art of a changing world", Royal Academy, London, December 3rd to January 31st

~ TIM DE LISLE

Picture credit: Antti Laitinen