It was a quietly thrilling journey, and when we rejoined the other groups to settle in for late-night jazz with Lungiswa Plaatjies, Reza Khota, Jonno Sweetman and Joshua Nemaire, there was a buzz in the air as all the musos compared notes.
When I’ve participated in Bailey’s site-specific happenings in the past, these have been outdoors, so I was intrigued to see what he and his collaborators would make of Spier’s eclectic interior spaces. We found Kawana onstage after making our way through the wreckage of chairs in what felt like an abandoned ballroom or auditorium. Levine jammed by the fireside in the centuries-old manor house. Majola was in the old wine cellar, candlelight and round tables lending the atmosphere of an underground jazz club.
This surprised me, as I had a date in the same venue a few days later to see the ceramic exhibition The Persistence of Memory, which had been installed in the space since June. To their credit, the Spier arts team turned it back into a gallery (hey presto!) and the ceramics are on display again until September 13.
The exhibition’s title conveys a neat curatorial concept. Primarily, it alludes to Salvador Dali’s famous painting of the “melting” clocks. There are a number of works on display that gesture towards surrealism’s playful absurdism as well as its biting satire, from Katja Abbott’s quirky hybrid creatures to the pipe-smoking figure of Zach Taljaard’s Vaarder (what, one wonders, is he smoking).
The title also suggests a range of ideas related to the medium. “Clay has memory,” as the exhibition text rightly asserts: “Memories of place and time are embedded in its fine grains of rock, and as the clay is shaped into new vessels, its form takes on new memories and meaning. Returned by human action into a rock-hard state, ceramic objects reveal the history of the clay from which they were made.”
This is a profound cycle, and by drawing attention to the material in this way, The Persistence of Memory reinscribes each item’s connection to ecologies of plants, soil and animals. Nature’s “deep time” also accommodates, and is accommodated by, human creative technologies: Hendrien Horn’s Fossil 25 is 3D printed in stoneware clay.
If clay is aligned with earth, the other ancient elements are similarly invoked. There is creative fire in the kiln, and even catharsis for the artist, as suggested by Kyle Hendri Strydom’s To burn is to let go. But there is fire’s destructive power, too, as we are reminded by Doreen Hemp’s three Pringle Bay Fires pieces. There is water, most explicitly in Nomfundo Mohlala’s Ocean in an Eggshell works. And there is air — in empty vessels, but also in the delicate filigree of Lois Lippstreu Strong’s Broderie Anglaise and the honeycomb geometries of Hennie Meyer’s Tilted Logic.
Carin Dorrington’s totem The Pink Devil and a Polka Dot Sausage underlines the dreamlike surrealist theme, as does Michaela Tsuen’s gently teasing Pink Doughnut Holes. Still, this exhibition has an undercurrent of pain. The fusion of comedy and tragedy is most explicit in Tarina Myburgh’s grotesque I am Fine. More earnest are Ilené Bothma’s A Tearing of Wounds, an Unpicking of Flesh and Dominic Pretorius’ Silent Expressions of their Surviving Hopes.
Liezel Loots’ bust, Wanderer, carries an ambiguous facial expression. Is the subject stoically enduring hardship — or is this a serene, even epiphanic look? Perhaps, notwithstanding the persistence of memory, the passage of time erases these distinctions.
This column originally appeared in Business Day.
CHRIS THURMAN: Thrilling sound journey at Spier Wine Farm
Also at the venue is the ceramic exhibition "The Persistence of Memory"
Image: Supplied
When Brett Bailey directs an arts encounter, you know you’re in for something special. There will be darkness and light, a sense of ritual, careful attention to place, and — if you can suspend your jaded, cynical self and bring your imaginative self to the experience — there will be magic.
So it proved with The Routes of Sound, Bailey’s latest music event at Spier Wine Farm. In small groups, we were guided between intimate performance venues on the estate, spending 30 minutes at a time under the spell of a solo artist or a duo.
My group started the evening with troubadour Jabulile Majola before listening to Siya Kawana’s fusion of gospel-style vocals and traditional instrumentation, and then concluded with the sultry folk rock of singer-songwriting veteran Laurie Levine.
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It was a quietly thrilling journey, and when we rejoined the other groups to settle in for late-night jazz with Lungiswa Plaatjies, Reza Khota, Jonno Sweetman and Joshua Nemaire, there was a buzz in the air as all the musos compared notes.
When I’ve participated in Bailey’s site-specific happenings in the past, these have been outdoors, so I was intrigued to see what he and his collaborators would make of Spier’s eclectic interior spaces. We found Kawana onstage after making our way through the wreckage of chairs in what felt like an abandoned ballroom or auditorium. Levine jammed by the fireside in the centuries-old manor house. Majola was in the old wine cellar, candlelight and round tables lending the atmosphere of an underground jazz club.
This surprised me, as I had a date in the same venue a few days later to see the ceramic exhibition The Persistence of Memory, which had been installed in the space since June. To their credit, the Spier arts team turned it back into a gallery (hey presto!) and the ceramics are on display again until September 13.
The exhibition’s title conveys a neat curatorial concept. Primarily, it alludes to Salvador Dali’s famous painting of the “melting” clocks. There are a number of works on display that gesture towards surrealism’s playful absurdism as well as its biting satire, from Katja Abbott’s quirky hybrid creatures to the pipe-smoking figure of Zach Taljaard’s Vaarder (what, one wonders, is he smoking).
The title also suggests a range of ideas related to the medium. “Clay has memory,” as the exhibition text rightly asserts: “Memories of place and time are embedded in its fine grains of rock, and as the clay is shaped into new vessels, its form takes on new memories and meaning. Returned by human action into a rock-hard state, ceramic objects reveal the history of the clay from which they were made.”
This is a profound cycle, and by drawing attention to the material in this way, The Persistence of Memory reinscribes each item’s connection to ecologies of plants, soil and animals. Nature’s “deep time” also accommodates, and is accommodated by, human creative technologies: Hendrien Horn’s Fossil 25 is 3D printed in stoneware clay.
If clay is aligned with earth, the other ancient elements are similarly invoked. There is creative fire in the kiln, and even catharsis for the artist, as suggested by Kyle Hendri Strydom’s To burn is to let go. But there is fire’s destructive power, too, as we are reminded by Doreen Hemp’s three Pringle Bay Fires pieces. There is water, most explicitly in Nomfundo Mohlala’s Ocean in an Eggshell works. And there is air — in empty vessels, but also in the delicate filigree of Lois Lippstreu Strong’s Broderie Anglaise and the honeycomb geometries of Hennie Meyer’s Tilted Logic.
Carin Dorrington’s totem The Pink Devil and a Polka Dot Sausage underlines the dreamlike surrealist theme, as does Michaela Tsuen’s gently teasing Pink Doughnut Holes. Still, this exhibition has an undercurrent of pain. The fusion of comedy and tragedy is most explicit in Tarina Myburgh’s grotesque I am Fine. More earnest are Ilené Bothma’s A Tearing of Wounds, an Unpicking of Flesh and Dominic Pretorius’ Silent Expressions of their Surviving Hopes.
Liezel Loots’ bust, Wanderer, carries an ambiguous facial expression. Is the subject stoically enduring hardship — or is this a serene, even epiphanic look? Perhaps, notwithstanding the persistence of memory, the passage of time erases these distinctions.
This column originally appeared in Business Day.
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