The Scars of Extraction
Gabriel Levine Brislin, ArtReview
July 2026
To the north, from the grounds of Bonnington House, a nineteenth-century manor within Jupiter Artland’s sculpture park, are visible a series of rust-red flat-topped mounds. These are the bings, huge heaps of burnt shale, a byproduct of Scotland’s early oil industry. They’re also artworks, according to idiosyncratic conceptualist John Latham, who designated them ‘process sculptures’ while hosted by the Scottish Office with the Artist Placement Group in 1975–76. The late artist’s approach to the postindustrial landscape, reckoning with its wastage and the cultural history it inadvertently memorialises, underpins many of the works in Extraction, by five artists of different generations, each processing our complex relationship to energy, industry and the environment. […]