Blake is chief curator at the Spier Arts Trust, and what she is describing here is the theme that emerged from the work submitted this year for Spier’s annual ceramic exhibition. “Many artists were using their practice to find their footing again, to re-establish a sense of balance and belonging,” Blake explains. She decided to title the exhibition Grounded Practice, initiating “a conversation about what it means to feel rooted in a world of change”.
There is, indeed, something reassuring about clay. It offers a tangible connection to earth — the sheer materiality of these ceramic sculptures, tested by fire but still fragile, presents an alternative to the virtual sea of ChatGPT, social media and e-meetings in which we mistakenly believe we are obliged to swim (or drown).
It may be unfair for me to frame the exhibition in this way. The work displayed is anything but ponderous or preachy, treating a range of subject matter with a light touch. Ceramics lend themselves to the quirky and the humorous, to satire and provocation.
Helen Doherty’s pieces Saint Google and Head in the iCloud collapse the digital-earthy divide. Kevin Collins’ gentle caricatures, Rosh Sewpersad’s blackface Proteus, Zach Taljaard’s King & Queen and Michaela Tsuen’s The Shrooms Trip each suggest a tongue-in-cheek approach to perennial human folly (or perhaps, like Karen Stewart’s Pink BLEUCH, simply a sticking out of the tongue, blowing a great big raspberry at those of us who take ourselves too seriously).
By contrast, Sello Letswalo’s masks demand more earnest attention, and Alex Shabalala’s wild dogs embed violence in a glossy, colourful aesthetic. Sinethemba Xola’s horned creature invokes something more sacred or numinous. John Bauer’s arrangements of small porcelain tiles give the appearance of an abstract composition from a distance but on close inspection reveal miniature portraits. Christian Buchner turns ceramic into canvas to paint scenes from (everyday) rural life.
Something like a “rural imagination”, too, inspired Liza Grobler to curate Diepe Grond — An Extract for the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn earlier this year. The exhibition, which borrows its title from Reza de Wet’s 1986 play, has since transferred to the HUB Gallery at the Spier Arts Trust premises in Cape Town.
De Wet’s play was a bold exposé of the moral corruption of apartheid, situated in the symbolically laden space of the farm. There is thus no easy comfort on offer here in retreating to the land. Indeed, a number of the works remind us that nature is capricious and sometimes at odds with (and in turn aggravated by) human endeavour.
Hanien Conradie’s Flood: Oudtshoorn is part of a series in which the artist depicts disasters. Luan Nel’s Wind Woed is a beautiful, terrifying hurricane of colour and movement. And Vanessa Berlein’s Where Ghosts Do Roam series shows silhouetted figures in a sepia-toned landscape — they may come from the past, but they feel disturbingly familiar from our collective dystopian dreams.
• ‘Diepe Grond — An Extract’ is at HUB Gallery (25 Commercial Street) until July 22 and ‘Grounded Practice’ is at Spier Wine Farm (Stellenbosch) until September 14.
Business Day.
CHRIS THURMAN: Grounded and rooted in a world of upheaval
The theme emerged from the work submitted this year for Spier’s annual ceramic exhibition
Image: Supplied
It’s a crazy, upside-down world we live in. Nothing is guaranteed. All is unmoored. I catch myself nodding along as I watch snippets of Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson criticising US-Israeli aggression in Gaza and Iran. Me, agreeing with the likes of Morgan and Carlson — unthinkable!
Of course, it’s absurd to talk about “old certainties” as if the ideological and geopolitical terrain was entirely clear before the second presidency of Donald Trump. The global order has been a muddle post-9/11. It was a mess in the 1990s. It was full of contradictions during the Cold War. It was an amoral free-for-all in the colonial period. Pick any era in human history, going back to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and you will find evidence of people complaining about how unstable and unpredictable everything is.
So, call it the human condition. Does that help? And are such platitudes accurate? Our shared condition may just be turning into something else in fully digital, AI-driven, climatically catastrophic decades to come. The fact is that, to quote Tamlin Blake, we live with a perpetual “sense of instability — personally, politically, environmentally”.
CHRIS THURMAN: ‘Why not a print?’ shows you don’t make a print on a whim
Blake is chief curator at the Spier Arts Trust, and what she is describing here is the theme that emerged from the work submitted this year for Spier’s annual ceramic exhibition. “Many artists were using their practice to find their footing again, to re-establish a sense of balance and belonging,” Blake explains. She decided to title the exhibition Grounded Practice, initiating “a conversation about what it means to feel rooted in a world of change”.
There is, indeed, something reassuring about clay. It offers a tangible connection to earth — the sheer materiality of these ceramic sculptures, tested by fire but still fragile, presents an alternative to the virtual sea of ChatGPT, social media and e-meetings in which we mistakenly believe we are obliged to swim (or drown).
It may be unfair for me to frame the exhibition in this way. The work displayed is anything but ponderous or preachy, treating a range of subject matter with a light touch. Ceramics lend themselves to the quirky and the humorous, to satire and provocation.
Helen Doherty’s pieces Saint Google and Head in the iCloud collapse the digital-earthy divide. Kevin Collins’ gentle caricatures, Rosh Sewpersad’s blackface Proteus, Zach Taljaard’s King & Queen and Michaela Tsuen’s The Shrooms Trip each suggest a tongue-in-cheek approach to perennial human folly (or perhaps, like Karen Stewart’s Pink BLEUCH, simply a sticking out of the tongue, blowing a great big raspberry at those of us who take ourselves too seriously).
By contrast, Sello Letswalo’s masks demand more earnest attention, and Alex Shabalala’s wild dogs embed violence in a glossy, colourful aesthetic. Sinethemba Xola’s horned creature invokes something more sacred or numinous. John Bauer’s arrangements of small porcelain tiles give the appearance of an abstract composition from a distance but on close inspection reveal miniature portraits. Christian Buchner turns ceramic into canvas to paint scenes from (everyday) rural life.
Something like a “rural imagination”, too, inspired Liza Grobler to curate Diepe Grond — An Extract for the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) in Oudtshoorn earlier this year. The exhibition, which borrows its title from Reza de Wet’s 1986 play, has since transferred to the HUB Gallery at the Spier Arts Trust premises in Cape Town.
De Wet’s play was a bold exposé of the moral corruption of apartheid, situated in the symbolically laden space of the farm. There is thus no easy comfort on offer here in retreating to the land. Indeed, a number of the works remind us that nature is capricious and sometimes at odds with (and in turn aggravated by) human endeavour.
Hanien Conradie’s Flood: Oudtshoorn is part of a series in which the artist depicts disasters. Luan Nel’s Wind Woed is a beautiful, terrifying hurricane of colour and movement. And Vanessa Berlein’s Where Ghosts Do Roam series shows silhouetted figures in a sepia-toned landscape — they may come from the past, but they feel disturbingly familiar from our collective dystopian dreams.
• ‘Diepe Grond — An Extract’ is at HUB Gallery (25 Commercial Street) until July 22 and ‘Grounded Practice’ is at Spier Wine Farm (Stellenbosch) until September 14.
Business Day.
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