Increasingly often, I find there is something very philistine about how I think. High art, poetry readings, contemporary dance: all these tend to make me scowl slightly. So, when I walked into Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Survival, and Crisis and saw a maroon doghouse hanging from the ceiling titled ‘God Kennel – A Tabernacle’, my hackles were immediately raised.

“The exhibition forces you to focus, to pay attention to the strangeness of the objects on show”

Yet as I began to browse the exhibition, my cynicism softened. Here is a Gale Warning is an exhibition that brings together the works of eight different artists and explores art’s capacity to warn us of incoming catastrophes. The catastrophes in question range from ecological disaster to housing crises. But, as curator Dr Amy Tobin emphasised at the opening of the exhibition, this art can also comfort and replenish us as these catastrophes loom. The exhibition is named after a flag that Rose Finn-Kelcey designed and displayed above Alexander Palace with the words ‘Here is a Gale Warning’ sewn upon it. The wind-dependent flag only shows its message when the gale force winds are blowing. Dr Tobin’s borrowed title reminds us that the crises of which these artworks warn us are already in full swing.

In the first room, Cecilia Vicuña’s close-up photographs of plastic on the beach initially seem unremarkable. But they force you to focus, to pay attention to the strangeness of the objects on show. They mimic the shapes and colours of the shells that you’d expect to find on a beach, but with none of their delicate beauty.

My hostility towards the art was tempered by the focus the artworks demanded of me. Vicuña’s photographs ‘Red Pipe’, simple close-ups of New York City at pavement level, had the same effect. They make the ordinary completely unrecognisable and ask us to rethink our relationship with everyday urban environments. They do all this by simply asking you to look more closely.

“Just as the crises with which these artworks interact are complex, so are their manifestations in art”

Many of the labels beside the pieces on display were at pains to explain just what was going on in the artworks. The label beside Justin Caguiat’s ‘Pissing in the Stars’ read that a part of the painting ‘looks like a constellation’. Beside one of Candace Hill-Montgomery’s weaves the label claimed that the piece in question looked like the keyboard of a piano. It is doubtless important to ground the viewer as they interact with these more abstract pieces, but I found that more often than not I saw something completely different. Many of the objects on display call attention to their own perculiarity. Just as the crises with which these artworks interact are complex, so are their manifestations in art. Take Tomashi Jackson’s work as an example: her piece ‘The Hair of the Dog II’ initially looks like a kind of plastic Rothko of red and black. But as you step back, faces emerge – the faces of those watching a house burn in the 1981 New Cross fire in London. The stories that these artworks tell cannot be the subject of art which is easily understood.

It is very hard to bring eight different artists together in one exhibition, yet Here is a Gale Warning certainly succeeds in this sense. Walking through the exhibition I was constantly aware that something was impending. Justin Caguiat’s piece ‘Pissing in the Stars’, one of the largest and most eye-catching artworks in the exhibition, was an excellent example of this. Beneath the muted browns and yellows of the painting lurks something bright and unidentifiable. While some shapes can be made out, there is a sense of a veiled world. It is hard to say whether or not this world is one which we should welcome or fear, but nonetheless it is a world of our own making and one which we must face sooner or later.

‘Here is a Gale Warning’ is open at Kettle’s Yard from 22 March to 29 June 2025.