Among the Trees review – a knotty problem

Running the entire width of one floor at London’s Hayward gallery is a six-screen video which depicts, at about life size, a spruce tree swaying in the breeze in Finland. To accommodate its scale, the tree is projected horizontally, and at its foot stands the artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, in a blue parka, dwarfed by the spreading conifer. The six projected sections of the tree tremble and sway out of sync with one another, adding to a growing sense of majestic befuddlement. You can’t take it in all at once, any more than you could if you stood before the real thing. Distantly, I hear the branches soughing and faint birdsong. Titled Horizontal – Vaakasuora, it makes you look and look some more.

Horizontal – Vaakasuora is one of the highlights of Among the Trees, an exhibition that fills the Hayward with a knotty tangle of romanticism, wood carving and trunk splitting, fake trees and real trees, doomed trees and casts of trees, dead trees, trees that never lived and trees that have survived for thousands of years. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s tree bears a blossom of colourful plastic bags which rustle in the draft from the gallery’s air conditioning, while Simryn Gill’s photographs of mangroves in the Straits of Malacca focus on the plastic detritus, lost fishing gear and clothing that festoon the branches in a horrible bunting on the edge of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

There are images of trees growing in vacant lots, of trees left standing alone as the habitat around them has been replaced by car parks, front yards and tended lawns, in a series of photographs by Robert Adams; a tree as pale and angular and bleached as the concrete wall behind it and the sky above in a painting by Gillian Carnegie; Zoe Leonard’s photographs of beleaguered New York trees growing around and through the fences and palings that contain them. All these trees, surviving against the odds.

Pink blossom erupts from a straggly one before a fenced-off wasteland on a dank roadside, evoking perfectly what passes for nature in the weary edge-of-town feral hinterlands that George Shaw is so great at evoking. He captures the sense of futility and frittered time in territories marked by a blaze on a trunk, beer cans among the trodden-down leaf litter. Shaw paints the sort of non-places where people can find their pleasures or get up to no good on the margins of things. As ever, there’s no one about in his paintings, which adds to their sense of malaise. Apart from Ahtila beneath her giant spruce, there is no visible human presence in Among the Trees. But we are there, nonetheless, both as witnesses and inexorably fucking everything up. Here’s a lynching tree, photographed by Steve McQueen during the shoot for 12 Years a Slave, glowing in a lightbox. It is just a tree, venerable, old, tainted.

Abel Rodrígues and his son Wilson, from the Colombian Nonuya indigenous group, make beautiful coloured drawings evoking the Amazon forest and their knowledge of its flora and fauna, which they left for Bogotá in 2002. Here is one moment in the show where a sense of nature’s passing, the interconnectedness of its living landscapes, is seen with such directness and evident, deep knowledge, that it touches the heart.

Among the Trees is a forest of signs. Even the gallery’s beautifully brutalist concrete walls bear the whorls and grain of the wood that was used to shutter and cast its sections. Perhaps this last provided the unconscious inspiration behind this often pleasurable and finally frustrating show of downed trunks, trees sliced into sections and reassembled, photographs of trees inverted (as though seen in a camera obscura) by Vancouver artist Rodney Graham, trees buried upside down by Robert Smithson, delicate watercolours of trees and trees only visible from certain angles, a tree carved from a log (one of several works by Giuseppe Penone), and a dense patch of forest cut by Eva Jospin from layers of corrugated cardboard. Amid this wintry tangle of trunks, branches and twigs, remnants of overgrown ruins peek from the gloom. Jospin’s work has the scale, and something of the majesty, of an arboreal rood screen. Nearby, another tangle of branches obscures Peter Doig’s 1991 The Architects Home in the Ravine, the house half hidden through frosted twigs. The quantity of accumulated details, painted touches and blips and the wandering skein of lines suck you in. I feel like a stalker in the woods, making my silent approach as I prepare a home invasion.

The theatrical atmosphere in the Hayward’s first, double-height lower gallery is accentuated by having all the works spotlit in the semi-gloom. I am not sure this entirely works for the paintings and photographs here. Thomas Struth’s mossy rocks and fallen branches below spring foliage in Japan, and his overgrown, primeval Chinese woodland – with, disconcertingly, cable cars floating overhead – have enough mystery and specific, well-captured light on their own.

What a puzzling exhibition Among the Trees is. Given how immediate the climate emergency is, and how little explicitly records the vast losses that both environmental changes and human greed/stupidity continue to wreak on the natural world – the sole thing that might save us – will we be left with only 3D printed trees and virtual forests? Jennifer Steinkamp’s Blind Eye is another wall-length projection, filled with a grove of animated birch trees. A breeze ruffles the branches, leaves sprout, catkins grow and fall, the foliage slowly changes colour and drops in an autumn wind. The seamless cycle, a whole year compressed into three minutes, begins again.

At the end we come to Roxy Paine’s desolated, burned-down forest floor, a tabletop diorama whose blackened fibreglass stumps and fallen branches glow with an inner fire of carefully contrived red LED lights. Sadly this won’t do. It just feels like an arty revelling in destruction. I think of the novelty two-bar electric fire my parents had – in an antique-effect aluminium grate several Disney-ish fibreglass logs glowed, fitfully, from the orange lightbulbs and twirling pinwheels that hid beneath the grey and brown loglettes, affecting a thoroughly implausible simulacrum of the real log fire that had previously sputtered and crackled in the same fireplace. The exposed electric elements did more than destroy the illusion; heating the fibreglass, they caused it to emit a noxious tang of polyester resin. Perhaps a real fire might have been even more ecologically unfriendly, but I doubt it.

• Among the Trees is at the Hayward gallery, London from 4 March to 17 May.