#an_uncomplicatedcurator
My goal
To encourage an awareness that artwork needn’t be new to have a present-day impact.
Please contact me for more info.
How has this idea evolved?
From 2022 to 2024, I lived
in the UK. There I realised that artists everywhere face similar complex exhibiting
challenges – the stress and expense of creating new work, high exhibiting costs,
and in general, a weak art market with poor sales which sometimes leaves an artist out of
pocket.
Also, many exhibition
writings, in what Grayson Perry calls 'International Art English', often only serve
to create a veil of confusion that alienates the viewer from the
artwork.
On my return I realised that I must use my SA artworld network and editing/writing skills to assist local artists in building up their exhibiting profiles in an uncomplicated way. Inviting artists to exhibit their earlier works within a fresh and contemporary context takes away the pressure of conceiving a theme and the costs of making new work.
And so, in January 2025, I began a new project as #an_uncomplicatedcurator.
2026!
UPCOMING 18 - 19 April 2026: STILL WATERS RUN DEEP
Prints by Emma Willemse and Photographs by Rudolph Willemse.
05 - 08 February 2026: OLD FRIENDS
I began 2026 with a small retrospective of my own work, created between 2005 and 2021. Two of the series were exhibited at the original Gordart Gallery (Melville) in 2005 and 2007 - hence the exhibition title Old Friends.
In 2025, I curated 6 exhibitions:
13 - 14 September 2025: SHE WOULD LIKE THIS
This exhibition showcased the creative life of my dear late friend Monique Rudman van Rooyen. The works were selected from over a 30-year period, from her student days until her last works. The main feature was her iconic suite The seven deadly sins.
16 - 17 August 2025: AGENCY OF OBJECTS
This exhibition comprised the works created by Gwenneth Miller during an art residency in Paris at the beginning of 2025. We are so used to seeing exhibitions of fully resolved artworks, so it’s fascinating when an artist shares her process work, as well as her finished artworks, within the formal structure of an art gallery.
02 - 03 August 2025: MAPPING A LANDSCAPE
Like many artists today, Laurel Holmes and Yolanda Warnich are each concerned with how our country’s rich natural environments are being slowly eroded by human encroachment by exploring the physical essence of experiencing the physical land. Both artists are Cape-based but have been working quite independently of each other. It is fascinating how each has dealt creatively with this issue in different ways. Yolanda is interested in preserving her memories of her natural environment as a protection against her own eco-grief. Laurel uses the natural subjects around her as metaphors for something more philosophical - personal yet universal - of how fragments picked up from the natural world can both provoke memories of specific times in now lost places and provide solace and healing.
05 - 06 July 2025: FRAGMENTS OF FUTURE PAST
Keith Makombora speaks about experience of having separate masks for his different life situations: he is the person he is, but acts one way within his traditional family, another with his urban friends, another at his sophisticated place of work, and even other ways in other situations, often needing to switch them quickly. He said that sometimes he feels as though he is always changing masks. The daily putting on of different masks is a topic he is currently exploring in these artworks. Similarly, the environments that he exists in shift from situation to situation. He has a fascination with ancient and contemporary aspects of the African rural and urban creative environments, and having lived in Zimbabwe, his formal influences include the classical Shona stone sculptures and the colours and cave paintings of Southern Africa.