Wahine
Ongoing Artistic Practice
From 2019 my investigation of the monotype print medium and the printed qualities of distressed and dissolved lithographic ink began to develop into horizon-less works exploring the feeling of being submerged.
What I strive to make in my studio is work that celebrates an empathic imagination. The shifting layers and planes of my marks and tones manifest an embodied experience (a sensory memory) of place, weather and emotion. For the viewer to respond empathetically to the work is my greatest desire.
In this age of the anthropocene, it is complicated to talk about either weather or place as being entirely of the natural world. But, while I hold this awareness, my life practice has allowed me to nurture a deep knowledge of the sea and sea-weather: natural elements that existed long before the current environment crisis. I have come to know these powerful, humbling, hopeful elements and I have been nudged into awe at the vastness of what lies outside me, and the opportunities I have to connect with it in multiple ways.
Image: Find What Cannot Be Found, 2018, Monotype Print, 960 x 630mm
This body of work, though not specifically or exclusively about the sea, is energised by the sensitivity and responsiveness that those elements have taught me. I hope it can connect the viewer, through a poetic visual language, to their own, personally-acquired (embodied) awareness of something that is greater, whether profoundly beautiful, terrifying or comforting. This connection requires engagement, a movement of the imagination, a transcendence of the self – and the feelings evoked will be different for each person.
I love the American painter Mark Rothko because his large canvases tap into a primal experience of space and spirit. Artist friend, George Chapman, describes looking at a Rothko like this:
It’s impossible to contain an entire painting in your gaze; instead, you scan the canvas piece by piece, perennially searching the dark, oceanic surface. It is in this act of scanning each area over and over that you begin to lose sense of the physical surrounding. The material world dissolves in a meditative gaze, and you begin to feel outside of time.
The ways that art can produce feeling is of real importance in our world today. Student protests in South Africa to eradicate lingering colonial systems in institutions, Climate Change Activism, Gender and Transgender Activism. What all these movements push for is a new systemic way. Applied philosopher, Jonathon Rowson commented in an interview with Krista Tippett that we need to feel the problems facing human kind. The crisis of Climate
Change, he says, is a crisis of disconnection between the facts and the feelings: “We know something is true but we don’t feel as if it is true, we don’t live as if it is true.”
Image: Here Like Before, 2018, Monotype Print, 960 x 630mm
In their book Sweetness and Strangeness, Heather Altfeld and Rebecca Diggs describe the process of making emotional connection through primary experience, and link it to metaphor.
As we see it, metaphor exists – and relies upon – the complex, emotionally resonant, arresting connections we make. These linkages, between ourselves and the world, require a degree of primary experience, as well as sensitivity to the nature and details of that experience. Metaphor is the knot between language and image, between language and sensory experience, and between language and narrative.
They go on to reflect on a talk given by the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, entitled ‘Metaphor in Our Lives’: One of his propositions was that ‘even the future has to have a metaphoric quality for us to imagine it’. The stories and sentiments to which metaphor adds depth, the linkages between self and sense, self and narrative, that metaphor encourages us to make are not frivolity or fiction – they are the essential means by which we connect to the planet and to each other, and one we critically need in order to dream a way out of the crises that assail us.
Staying committed enough both to live with feeling in the present, and imagine a future, is hard. But I am convinced that art can help us do it - and I hope these works invoke for the viewer exactly these “emotionally resonant, arresting connections”: linkages that propel them into awareness, that invite them too, to feel, imagine and dream.
Prints from this investigation have been exhibited at the following locations:
2022 Days of Being Wild, Cavalli Gallery, Stellenbosch, Cape Town.
2021 LANDSCAPE, Spin Street Gallery, Cape Town.
2020 Light from Dark, Spin Street Gallery, Cape Town.
2019 Conversations, Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town.
2019 Cape Town Art Fair, Salon91 Gallery Booth.
