A journey through an artist’s landscape of emotions

Sethembile Msezane’s latest exhibition titled: Liguqubele iZulu transports us to a world where the cycles of nature are intertwined with the complexities of our internal lives. With each stroke of the brush, the artist explores the intricate dance between the natural world and the fragility of our human experience.

In this exhibition, the viewer is tasked with thinking through multiple landscapes. We are encouraged to consider the actual landscape around us — the ebb and flow of the tides, the formation of clouds that portend the arrival of rain, and the vast expanse of the sky. But we are also asked to contemplate our internal landscapes — the ever-changing weather systems that exist within us, the seasons of our emotional lives that can bring us to our highest highs and lowest lows.

Through a series of monochromatic paintings, Msezane takes us on a personal journey of her own life where we witness moments of challenge and moments of surrender, rendered in shades of black and white that evoke a sense of timelessness. Materials like snuff and hair are incorporated into the paintings, reminding us that our internal lives are intimately connected to the natural world that surrounds us. The exhibition is also a reflection of landscaping, as the process of doing deep work in tending and nurturing ourselves through our own seasons, on each canvas the artist shows us that our lives are never static, in contrast we are in a constant state of flux. It is up to us to embrace this ebb and flow, to find beauty in the changes that occur and to surrender to the cycles of our own lives. We spoke to Msezane to find out more about her work.

As a departure from your previous work, can you describe this new chapter in your artistic journey and what inspired you to release this particular exhibition into the world? How does this work represent a significant part of your creative evolution?

I have been quietly working on Liguqubele iZulu for about four years, which marks at least half of my practice. While it may be new publicly it’s been in my consciousness and studio for a while. It was challenging for various reasons but mainly because it is deeply personal, which made me feel vulnerable. It was difficult looking at my own emotional, mental, and spiritual state during a period of loss. I processed these through paintings that were pleasing to the eye but evoked fear and all sorts of emotions I wasn’t ready to process at the time.

At some point these paintings, that felt like a kind of journaling, took up space in my studio and I realised that was an exhibition that needed to be shared. The thought scared me, so I continued working on other projects and mediums alongside working on myself. The healing work I undertook found its way into the work, this finally made me comfortable to share the work with others.

As an interdisciplinary artist mainly known for photography and live works, I had to mess with my own perception of myself as my overcast season changed me in so many ways. I had to also claim painting, a medium I always felt was rigid in accepting my identity at Michaelis School of Fine Art, I had to make it my own. Thus, you will see that the abstract paintings imbued with snuff, hair, rainwater and paint are in a realm of their own.

How do you use art to explore the fragility of human experience and emotion and the different ways it manifests in our lives? How does this relate to your larger themes of nature and spirituality?

As I think about these questions it’s morning and I’m watching the sunrise on the land my mother grew up in Port Shepstone. There are valleys, the air is cool and I hear cocks crowing and the sounds of crickets. My uncle told me he likes to sit in silence and survey the land and with it his consciousness before he speaks to people in the morning. I look at this and think that this is the mother of creation. Is this not where Art comes from?

As people we are fixated with ourselves, but I’ve come to understand that the human condition is closely linked to natural worlds and is not apart from it. Anthropologist Alan T Campbell speaks of Animism as connotations of air, of breath, of life. Hence, we might be able to see everything in the world around us as “animated”; not inert, or distanced from us, but endowed with vigour and liveliness as we are.

These are the principles I like to think about the way I practise and live my life. As such when we observe how long it may take for a branch to repair itself and grow once it’s been cut from a tree you also realise that there’s the possibility that it may not grow back. When we look at our own fragility, we expect healing and reintegration into society to be a fast process as if we are machines and not living breathing beings.

These lessons land themselves into the work I do as an artist as I explore different seasons, the voices in water, sound, dance even in the political these exist.

How does the exhibition’s integration of the plants used in snuff, water, and hair as different materials, textures and elements serve as a reflection of our intertwined relationship with the natural world, and what implications does this have for our understanding of self and our emotional wellbeing?

Most elements and resources have a multiplicity in how they exist and can be used. Snuff has elements like grass or cow dung that can be used as food, medicine and even building material. Similarly, water can be used to cleanse, nourish, and even heal.

I like to think of humanity as having a plurality in existence as well. I think we lose our power when we limit ourselves to the secular world. Indigenous teachings acknowledge ancestry and the cosmos, and this continues to be relevant today.

If we were to acknowledge this in understanding we are more than flesh we are also spirit and without the spirit or the soul the flesh ceases to live, we’d be more in tune with ourselves.  This exhibition becomes a meditation of these thoughts as a knowledge system in processing my own difficulties.

How do you hope your exhibition will inspire viewers to think differently about their own relationship with nature, spirituality, and the cycles of life?

As people we have experienced social, economic, and spiritual death. I think this has come from our disconnection from nature and the cosmos. The late Babu Credo Mutwa an author and sangoma alludes to not only listening to news outlets as an antenna of discernment and decision making but to also use our internal pulse, some may call this intuition.

We are in the era of the Anthropocene and some communities are affected more than others by the damage we have created to the environment. Ultimately, the loss of humanity affects us all and I believe this is part of the reason we see a deterioration of our mental, emotional and spiritual health which in turn becomes the decay in our society. If we take care of our natural worlds, we take care of ourselves.

Liguqubele iZulu is currently showing at BKhz Gallery at 21 Keyes Avenue in Rosebank. Visit bkhz.art for more.