Ruin Lust, an expansive exhibition currently showing at Tate Britain, explores the melancholy, mournful and thrilling uses of ruins in art over the past four centuries. There’s something addictive about a ruin; an addiction that has captivated visual artists from the seventeenth century to present day equivalents – be they lensing explorers or blog-trawlers searching for the next images of previously undiscovered, decaying landscapes.

Take the hundreds of images of dilapidated theme parks scattered across Japan that continue to resurface, or the young blogger who broke into a Russian missile factory in 2012, sharing her findings on the web. There’s something in it for everyone. Cultural context plays a big role in such obsessions, but as Amy Concannon, Tate Britain Assistant Curator 1790-1850, explains, there is also a deeper yearning at play here.

Tempe Nakiska: At base, what do you think sparks human desire to uncover lost treasures?
Amy Concannon: Coming across or seeking out ruins, be they in the landscape or culture more broadly is something inherently evocative. They might ignite thoughts of the past, now crumbled or obsolete, but also of the future – inspiring us to muse on what might become of our own culture as time passes.

TN: What do you think sparked the ‘ruin lust’ raging amongst artists in the late eighteenth century?
AC: The exhibition includes two etchings from the 1760s by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian archaeologist, artist, theorist and designer who saw the ruins of Classical Rome ‘wasting away under the ravages of time’ and wanted to make etchings that would preserve the memory of gigantic feats of Classical achievement, like the Colosseum. These etchings were highly influential upon British artists travelling in Italy (and tourists in the age of the Grand Tour). Piranesi’s focus on fantastical and ruined building became a framework by which British artists began to envisage the artistic potential of ruins on their home turf, with many of them emulating Piranesi’s use of unusual vantage points that emphasised buildings’ height and grandeur.

British artists were guided in their choice of ruins by the immense popularity of William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, published in 1782, a tourist’s guide to the sights of the Wye Valley; a first edition of this best-selling book features in the exhibition. Gilpin singled out the Gothic ruin of Tintern Abbey, which fell during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, as a ‘picturesque’ ruin and it became an emblem to which many writers like Wordsworth and artists like JMW Turner flocked. Tintern Abbey was the ‘poster boy’ of the ruin lust of the late eighteenth century, prized for the way mosses and ivy had ‘reclaimed’ it, and for the crumbling texture of its stone.

TN: John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum and Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander show two very different societies in ruins. What is it that unites these pieces?
These works are united by their being imaginary projections of ruined civilisations. In Martin’s epic painting we see the great Roman cities in the process of ruination. His depiction of the violence, heat and destructive force of Vesuvius acts as a warning of our vulnerability of society at the hands of greater natural forces. This anxiety and warning is echoed in Doré’s image, too – here we look at a future ruin of London through the eyes of a traveller from the new world, New Zealand. St. Paul’s Cathedral is pictured as a crumbling shell, symbolising the potential fragility of this world-leading city. It’s an image that’s as fascinating to Londoners in 2014 as it was in 1872.

TN: Would you say there is a sense of sadness to the exhibition due to the great loss inherent in its subjects? Is there also a sense of positivity in the idea of reconstruction and how is it expressed?
AC: I think there’s a stronger sense of melancholy, rather than sadness, but the emotions projected by and onto images of ruin are various and complex. There is a definite sense of positivity in some of the works, in which the future potential of ruins is realised – for example in Laura Oldfield Ford’s painting Tweed House, Teviot Street we see squatters re-inhabiting a condemned housing estate, endowing the site with new life. As it was home to many artists, this building then became a creative hub, a site where ideas and productive relationships were formed.

TN: Today, we see a kind of ‘ruin lust’ amongst modern creatives and photographers who seek out abandoned sites and post them to their blogs via the internet. What connects these people to the more historic artists Ruin Lust covers?
AC: The sharing of today’s lust for ruins is reflected in the dissemination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists’ images of ruins via prints. These prints might form lavish volumes – the equivalent of today’s ‘coffee table’ books – or they might be reproduced in more modest publications. Either way, ruins were as integral a component of visual culture in the late 1700s and 1800s as they are today, differing primarily in the way in which the images were circulated.

Ruin Lust runs until May 18th at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG9TG