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 created not only through sight but also through touch. Willemse shifted this into the artmaking process, where not only sight and touch, but sound, smell, and taste were equally integrated.
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, breathing in the dry sandy air, parched throats, the scent of the veld plants. 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 engage with the artefacts by feeling them as well as looking at them while making our work, I decided to use a trace monotype process, where I could create visual textures to emphasise their smoothness, sharpness, or roughness. As well, the rubbing action that created the coarse background areas of the monotypes, the finely drawn but broken interconnecting lines, and the torn irregular shapes of the formats, were intended to add to the sense that these arbitrary fragments had drifted together by chance within this harsh microcosm of the Great Karoo.
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, the uprooted, and of the symbolism around stones.
