February 20, 2012 - February 27, 2012
Artist's studio, Johannesburg
Not formally exhibited
Faultlines of fragility
Created during a workshop in the Great Karoo, Northern Cape
Artist’s statement
These images were created at a week-long workshop I attended in 2012.
Run by Emma Willemse, the workshop centred around the idea of haptic visuality. In brief, in the haptic visual context, the art is not only to do with sight but also with touch. Willemse shifted this into the artmaking process, where sight and touch became equally important.
The workshop was held in February, in a barn in the Great Karoo, where the temperature had reached 42º by 11am. We were sent out into the veld for an uncompromising experience of bodily awareness: the beating of the sun and the trickling of the sweat on our bodies, the scrub of the veld scratching our legs, bites from little midges itching our skins, the dry sandy air filling our nasal passages. Our task was to collect small artefacts from the ground and bring them back to the barn to use as source for our artmaking. I collected 10 small random fragments that I found in an area of about 6 square meters.
With almost 18 participants, many different types of work evolved during this process. Since the idea was to touch the artefacts as well as look at them while making our work, I decided to use a trace monotype process, where I could create visual textures as well as emphasise smoothness and sharpness. The rough backgrounds of the monotypes were intended to add to the sense of the objects lying in a place of harshness, while the fine interconnecting lines link these arbitrary fragments one to another.
The images are below. This may seem like a simple collection, but to this day they have provided source material for much of my work, and have shifted my perceptions around the significance of the fragment, the broken, and the uprooted, and of the symbolism around stones.
