Paean to a remarkable child

The resonant smack of moist clay as it hits the ground is a candid yet sacred noise. Something is happening. Forcefully. The hand-sized piece of moist mud is transformed by the friction of air and the speed of gravity. Air bubbles are being exploded out of it. It will never be the same again. This is the sound that you hear upon entering Impact, a solo exhibition by Joni Brenner in the Origins Centre on Wits University campus.

The sound emanates from a film called Force/Touch, created by Andy Spitz, of Brenner at work with handfuls of clay and mud, giving them impacts that will define their beauty, their value, their status. The piece is on a loop and the sound, violent and intrusive, yet gentle, measured and direct, punctuates your thinking as you meander around the rest of the work on show.

In a sense this is a retrospective exhibition for Brenner, who has developed a practice over decades, of working around and through her projects and developing them to maturity, not linearly, but in an approach stimulated by chance and gut, by visiting and revisiting the ideas as they grow. Her series of portraits is a case in point. Morphed over time into a contemplation of the skull, the underlying structure of the face, her focus on the human head developed through a myriad of beautiful water colour drawings and clay works, examining — as did artists of the ilk of Claude Monet — ostensibly the same object with great curiosity and earnestness. Again and again.

The exhibition, beautifully mounted in the rather disparately shaped gallery, talks to the space and every piece sings to every other piece, in how it reflects on history and perception, on artmaking and the wisdom of the artist’s decisions. Above all, is the child, central to it all.

In the middle of the space, there is a reconstruction of the braincase and facial skeleton that became known as the skull of the Taung Child. Found in 1924, these skull fragments, with milk teeth still in place, were collectively identified by then-anatomist from Australia, Raymond Dart, as that of a juvenile early human ancestor known as the Australopithecus africanus, the oldest recovered evidence for hominid evolution. It was estimated to be between 2.5-million and 2.8-million years old, effectively and unequivocally putting Africa as the origin of humankind in place.  

In 2011, Brenner first started painting this extraordinary object in watercolour, for an exhibition at the Origins Centre, called the Life of Bone. She worked from the original fossil, from memory and from plaster casts of it. She allowed her drawings to bleed from paper onto stone surfaces and morph into abstractions of the original perceptual studies, as is her wont. 

Her transition from ink to clay to bronze filled that organic approach to exploring an idea and the result is the poetic understanding not only of the hominid and its history, but of the process of artmaking itself.

Ten years ago, Brenner upscaled and cast four clay heads premised on the modern human skull for an exhibition at the Nirox Sculpture Park, situated on the edge of the Cradle of Humankind in what is now Mogale City. Not all the works were completed in time for that exhibition.

Trained as a painter, skilled in draughtsmanship and having established her speciality in the glory of watercolour and working on a small scale with clay, casting an enormous work in bronze was immensely and unfamiliarly physical for Brenner, representing, as it does, the artist’s whole body grappling with the medium. One of the works in the series is thus named Elbowed, reflecting on the hard and unusual labour involved in taming the medium to suit her purposes. The four works have not yet been shown together in the same space. Until now.

With a lexicon of impacted pieces of clay, from Thud to Probe, Little Slam and Mona Lisa to Fold, there are a range of abstract slivers off the original idea on show, as well as a body of portraits that blend the notion of self-image with that of how bones cohere to operate in the joint of a hip or an elbow, but above all, is the sensory, mesmerising choreography of working with clay that is fierce and ritualistic, beautiful and time-driven as it holds this exhibition together.

Impact is located at the end of the passage that defines the Origins Centre’s opening spaces, kept in as pristine a working condition as they were when the centre opened 28 years ago. On the way there, you will encounter, among other things, the mystery and the magic of research into rock art, of Walter Oltmann’s map of the world in wire, and Hannelie Coetzee’s Synanthropes, in which reclaimed material becomes monsters evocative of !Xam mythology, of an understanding of the beginning of humanity as we know it.

Brenner’s forays into the meaning of ink and clay around the identity of a juvenile creature, almost a human, fits this space with elegance and wonder.

Impact is on show until April 2025.