Onwin's Nigredo — Laid to Waste, 1992 (above), installation in the Square Chapel, Halifax. Credit: COURTESY OF HENRY MOORE SCULPTURE TRUST AND GLEN ONWIN

Early in the 1970s the artist Glen Onwin discovered the extensive saltmarsh near Dunbar to the east of Edinburgh. Its landscape is shaped by tidal flooding, the ebb and flow of subterranean waters, erosion and consolidation, precipitation and evaporation, the crystallizing and dissolving of salt, and the tenacious grip of specialized vegetation. This strange topography embodied through natural processes those cyclical qualities of life and death that Onwin had already been seeking through artistic creation.

Onwin works with a wide range of media: photographs, not only of features visible to the naked eye but also of structures discernible with an electron microscope; printed images, including a large white-on-black recitation of the periodic table of the elements; semi-abstract pictures ‘painted’ with wax, minerals and organic materials, composed at least in part by chance; and installations that typically use concentrated solutions of chemicals to create evolving panoramas of seas, lakes, continents and islands.

His 1992 installation in the partly derelict Square Chapel in Halifax, West Yorkshire, centred upon a vat of black brine, a square sea in which clusters of crystals congealed around barren lands of floating wax, each different in their aggregated morphologies yet essentially similar in the underlying mechanisms of aggregation.

The processes behind such formations stand within the province of the science of chemistry. And there is much in Onwin's response to the phenomena that is consistent with modern science, in particular the search for the constants that decree that salt ideally seeks to crystallize in cubes, or that determine those common morphologies transcending scale, from the cosmic to the microscopic.

Credit: GLEN ONWIN

He says: “I want to work in a microcosmic, macrocosmic way, to get as much information from the larger image of the work as⃛ from the detail. It is important you know the detail is there, but you should stand back⃛ and view the whole work with that knowledge.”

However, he is also delving into realms of symbolism that share more with alchemy, particularly in its psychological interpretation by Carl Jung, than with the prevailing tenor of modern science. Such formations as a cube of salt, and a circular ring of vegetation growing from its dying centre in the saltmarsh, echo the ancient symbols that express the mystical quest to explain age-old perceptions. His fascination with the emergence of shape from chaos marries the massa confusa of alchemy with the modern speculations on the origins of matter. If this seems a strange marriage, it is appropriate to recall that Newton was an alchemist. The title of the Halifax installation, Nigredo, is openly alchemical in its reference to the primitive and sometimes recurrent stage of black putrefaction in the transmutation of substances, while its subtitle, Laid to Waste, alludes to his long-standing concern for the fragile ecology of our planet.

In the saltmarsh, a precarious balance determines that the same substances can either give life or decree death. He senses that this stands as both physical model and imaginative metaphor for the holistic processes, small and grand, in which we intervene at our peril.