Build anywhere in the City of London and you will have archaeologists watching every move your bulldozer makes, so best work with them. When Bloomberg planned its European headquarters it incorporated the ancient Roman Temple of Mithras in a basement, displaying finds made during the pre-construction dig in a gallery that also shows contemporary art. Now Newcastle-born twins Jane and Louise Wilson have taken a long hard look at four of those finds, wooden posts or stakes that are about 2,000 years old. It\u2019s thought they supported an ancient crossing over the River Walbrook. Are they Roman, or even pre-Roman?<\/p>\n
Part of their response appears as a surreal swarming world they depict under two escalators outside another City landmark, the Leadenhall Building \u2013 AKA the Cheesegrater (the rest is in a simultaneous free exhibition at Bloomberg Space). The Wilsons have plastered prints on the undersides of its entrance escalators bubbling with brews of sinister life that look like multiple eyes or frogspawn. In fact, these clouds of watery mutants are vastly enlarged images of the microscopic creatures that they saw, with the help of Danish and British archaeologists, inside the four Walbrook crossing posts.<\/p>\n
Like stakes to kill vampires \u2026 Jane and Louise Wilson with the four Walbrook crossing posts. Photograph: Jason Alden<\/p>\n
The Wilson sisters\u2019 graffiti-like invasion of the Cheesegrater\u2019s cool, rational plaza is easily the most enticing new artwork in this summer\u2019s Sculpture<\/a> in the City, a free festival of public art amid some of the most expensive real estate on Earth. Clearly it is not a sculpture, but the positioning of their double \u201cmural\u201d underneath the metallic escalators works in their favour. The biological festering of these alien-looking entities evokes the secret organic world in the ground beneath us, just as their artwork skulks below the glossy Cheesegrater.<\/p>\n It\u2019s called Dendrophiles \u2013 \u201ctree lovers\u201d in Latin. You probably thought folk horror came from the country, but this part of London is full of ancient echoes of ritual and disease, death and decay beneath its towering icons of cash.<\/p>\n A triffidian life form \u2026 Looping Loop by Andrew Sabin. Photograph: Nick Turpin\/Copyright the artist, Courtesy of the artist and Brooke Benington<\/p>\n Both the other new commissions for Sculpture in the City also delve into tangled vegetative worlds. Ai Weiwei<\/a> shows a cast iron replica of Brazilian tree roots on the slightly sinister grassed-over plague pit that is the churchyard of St Botolph without Bishopsgate. It\u2019s disappointingly unnoticeable in this setting. That\u2019s the trouble with public sculpture: to pass all the demands of landowners, local government and churches it often has to have its edge effaced to fit. Andrew Sabin resists this by plonking his tentacular sculpture of a triffidian life form in the middle of a pavement where it is hard to ignore.<\/p>\n The demands of sculpting for the City, with all these corporations watching you from their eyries, must be arduous. Alongside the three new pieces, are works by Julian Opie, Maya Rose Edwards and more remaining in place from previous years. It\u2019s a nice enough excuse for a London walk. But it was Jane and Louise Wilson\u2019s Dendrophiles that grabbed me and lured me to their exhibition at Bloomberg Space.<\/p>\n Ritual \u2026 a still from Performance of Entrapment by Jane and Louise Wilson. Photograph: \u00a9 Jane and Louise Wilson<\/p>\n Here DNA spirals, monsters and beading, bubbling water proliferate in a kind of archaeological nightclub. An abyss-like, circular mirror reflects flashing lights. The other side of the mirror is a screen on which are projected video images of life-crowded water and trees alternating with footage of an all-female folk performance at the Ise Jingu temple in Japan, which has held the Sacred Mirror of the Emperor since ancient times.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n It all makes poetic sense, in an enjoyably wacky way. Downstairs is the Temple of Mithras, a similar age to the Japanese site but home to an all-male cult, popular with soldiers. So the two places hauntingly mirror or reverse each other.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the posts from the River Walbrook point silently upward, like stakes to kill vampires that come out in the City at night. As I said \u2013 folk horror is not just for the countryside.<\/p>\n