Eden Project’s new exhibition hides a 600,000-year-old axe

A giant carved head stands just inside the door, and wedged into the crown of its skull is a small, pale flint that was last held by human hands 600,000 years ago. That is the kind of welcome waiting at Eden Project’s newest show, and it barely lets up from there.

📷Credit: Steve Tanner

Four zones, one story

Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet opens today, Friday 18 September, and runs for a year. It is a major new exhibition bringing together sculpture, photography, film and contemporary art, including newly commissioned pieces never shown in public before, and it takes visitors through four connected zones: Extinction, Climate, Community and Renewal.

Together the four sections are meant to carry visitors through a single arc, from loss through resilience and into hope, tracing humanity’s relationship with a changing world from prehistoric time, through the present, and into whatever comes next.

The objects that stop you in your tracks

The show’s most striking pieces lean on materials that are almost impossible to picture the age of. Emily Young’s The Connection: A Meeting of Minds (2023) incorporates a 600,000-year-old hand axe crafted by Homo heidelbergensis, an early human ancestor, set into a sculpted stone head.

Richard Deacon’s Long in the Tooth (2023) mounts fossilised teeth from extinct species onto ancient wood recovered from a prehistoric flooded forest. David Nash’s Faraway Trees (2024) features pinecones dating back roughly 800,000 years. And Eleanor Lakelin’s Pine Studies (2024) is crafted using pine resin from an 875,000-year-old pine discovered at Happisburgh Beach, one of the oldest surviving traces of prehistoric woodland in Britain.

A red sandstone moon in the Rainforest Biome

Not every piece sits behind glass. Land artist Jon Foreman’s Stone Moon has been recreated on site inside the Rainforest Biome, formed from red sandstone collected on the Pembrokeshire coast. It is a large-scale installation built to reflect the erosion and change shaping Britain’s landscapes, and it doubles as a dramatic focal point for anyone walking through the biome itself.

More than 35 artists, and the charity behind them

The exhibition features more than 35 artists, photographers, sculptors and filmmakers, among them Richard Deacon, Emily Young, Peter Randall-Page, Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash, Conrad Shawcross, Julian Stair, Eleanor Lakelin, Cristina Mittermeier, Ami Vitale, Sebastião Salgado, Richard Mosse, Paul Nicklen, Daniel Beltra, Emily Lamb, Michael Kenna, Bigert & Bergström, Beverly Joubert, Rashid Diab, Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar, Nasim Hantehzadeh and Shaq Koyok.

It was created by Explorers Against Extinction, a UK conservation charity that works with partners around the world. The charity supports more than 50 frontline conservation projects protecting endangered species and restoring ecosystems across 35 countries, and uses art, education and responsible wildlife travel to push for action on nature.

Eden turns 25 this year, and the Cornwall attraction says it has generated £6.8 billion in total economic impact for the South West since it first opened in 2001. All proceeds from the exhibition go back into Eden’s charitable work in the UK and abroad, detailed on its own mission page.

Tickets for Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet are available to book online now. Somewhere between the flint axe at the entrance and the sandstone moon in the rainforest, the exhibition asks the same question twice: what survives, and what gets left behind.