Description

The exhibition consists of images and accompanying words, referred to by Bert Olivier as “word webs”. The photos are black-and-white pen–and–ink drawings on rice paper, delicately rendered. The choice of media could be perceived as metaphorical of the tensions and sensitive intricacies of her culture, geopolitics, and concerns of this country.

Her work deals with the inevitable cycle of life, issues of female suppression in a politically conflicted world and the interrelationship of imagination and the everyday affective domain of the female.

“I realised that we are all capable of doing terrible things. I woke up to my generation and was horrified.”

“I needed to understand exploitation and why some could resist. And then something about the realm of our mothers shared by all human beings, undisturbed by the illnesses of the time we are situated in, started to make sense.”

The intention was to reveal the suppressed feminine, to delve into the unconscious and to throw light on the distortions, death and famine to the feminine aspect of humanity, to resurrect, to sing, to soothe, to dance, to reconnect, to understand the organic cycle of life and death and the unbearable pain of the in-between, to mourn the deaths (natural and psychological) of a country subjected to the horrors of misplaced power, the violent outcome of being stuck in only one thought-frame, and on another level the forever present circular movement from light to darkness, life to death, night to illumination – a universal story.

From a third-person perspective, I had a sense of an old woman, calm, crooning and cackling away, crying and laughing at the stupidity and sometimes brilliance of humanity – holding the knowledge of the Presence, the immediate moment, the Source of evolution and involution, the unshakeable essence of un unfolding intelligence of Mother Earth.

“…her work is redolent with memories of Jungian archetypes and Tolkienesque imaginings of Middle-Earthean figurations…The images that populate the time-space of her work do not address us at the level of logic but rather in the sphere of a collective imagination into which the artist has somehow, amazingly, had insight. These sometimes very intricately rendered figures embody and convey a realm of eloquent silence, where we rediscover the importance of touch, the paradoxical interpenetration of being and non-being, the terror of time’s nihilating black hole, juxtaposed with the comforting wisdom of the feminine and its promise of rejuvenation, as well as the ambiguous arachnid image of a web: comforting and yet frightening in its combination of security and paralysis.
Moreover, her images forcefully raise the question of whether our dreams are ours to dream or whether we are the ones being dreamt of after all. But throughout all these enchanting images, often reminiscent of the decorative symbolic insight of Gustav Klimt, we are brought face to face with the realisation that we cannot and should not forget the earth as our mother.
For if we renounce her, we will have lost our humanity”. Bert Olivier – review

“Beyond word,
In the silencing of thought,
We are already there.” Alan Watts