Under the Surface

Abstract

The project “Under the surface” consisted of 22 new works in a range of media. The installations were interactions between specific ‘ecologies’ of people and places. I used three group exhibitions as an emergent method of tacit thinking, applying each structured platform as another step in the process to assemble ideas. The golden thread running through the research project was that communal relationships are core to both human culture and substrates in nature. In April (2022), new sketches were exhibited (together with older work) in the group exhibition “MESH, the fabric of friends”. My research asked questions about the interrelatedness woven between stuff and living communities, contemplating the underlying connections between people and materials. Whilst the works extended a previous theme of fungi as a metaphor for tangible and intangible bonds, I explored specific links between forest, kinship and mediative practice. An example of the concept was the series of twelve ink paintings of bells displayed on a glass table. I have been collecting small hand-held bells over many years, bought at places visited with family, or gifted by friends. Bells summon people to gather for beginnings or for endings, and the act of ringing facilitates knowledge of place and people. Rendering the bells became a scrutiny of their properties, evoking their materiality that contributes to the specific sound. I was struck by the thought that the vitality that artists radiate, also becomes evidence of the ‘stuff’ we are made off. Another example was the assemblage “Sounding” (2022), where I created the resonance between the seemingly disparate subject matter – bells and mushrooms. Apart from the shape of the bell resembling a mushroom, the vibrating sounds of bells also acts as a source of energy. In this work, bracket fungi collected from artist friend’s wild garden were dried, sealed and reconfigured beneath cut-out images of bells, suggesting an echo of repetitive forms. A formal reciprocity was thus applied to the two groups in relation to each other and influenced by theories of intermediality. in September (2022), the second phase of the project was shown at White River Art Gallery, consolidating the theme of “Under the Surface”. In the artist’s statement, I referred to Haraway’s (2016) well-known phrase of “stories that gather stories”, which is relevant to presentations of real and imagined ecologies. In eight new works I reconsidered images in terms of “matter” in landscapes. My experience of the bushveld contains both melancholy and aversion. The research into Hares foot inkcap mushrooms reminded me of sooty stalked puffball fungi from childhood and it sparked the narrative in two encaustic paintings about living with your demons and shedding old skin. The works touched both personal stories and ‘ecological’ understanding of symbiosis in communities. The October (2022) participation in “Looking into…and seeing beyond” at Unisa Art Gallery offered an opportunity for the most experimental part of the theme. The earlier processes planned in MESH were reconstructed in assemblages, providing renewed agency: • two assemblages from “MESH” were extended to “Sounding II” and “This too shall pass II”, where materials, concept and composition were reworked with beeswax, spore dust and additional objects. • three new digital compositions reflected on a story that the substance of a bell became the world, • and an installation “Falling into your own shadow I” were created. This included an interspecies ‘collaboration’ with fungi: objects were placed on the young growths, and they became partially or entirely unified with the bracket mushrooms throughout the year. The mixed media “Falling into your shadow II” was a third larger reinvention of the original small sketch shown at MESH.

The time lapse from the first to the third presentation offered opportunity for gestation - a term favoured by writers on the nature of tacit knowledge (Barrett and Bolt 2014). As a contribution to critically thinking about practice-led research, I considered that a solo exhibition offers the artist a singular distance to reflect, here the unfolding research in three group exhibitions with artists from different stages of my life, allowed intermittent contemplation. All works are on the websites of the galleries and was published in SA Art Times