Artangel is keeping it in the family for its next public art project. Natural Selection—a collaboration between the UK artist Andy Holden and his father, the ornithologist Peter Holden—is due to go on show in the former Newington Library, Elephant & Castle in south London, next month (10 September-5 November). “The work is the culmination of collaborations with my dad over about seven years, which started as a performance and gradually grew into this body of jointly authored work,” Andy tells us. “The show is dependent on my father’s knowledge. Upstairs is a Natural History of Nest Building, which looks at how birds make nests, and questions of what is innate and what is learnt in the process of making.” A three-screen video shows father and son inspecting various nesting sites. “Downstairs in the basement is a Social History of Egg Collecting, which is a historical account of egg-collecting in Britain, charting how it began as scientific pursuit and ended up as a criminalised activity in the space of 100 years,” Holden Jr. adds. An animated crow outlines the narrative by the way.
