A GLASS DARKLY
Solo exhibition
2 - 25 August 2024, KZNSA Park Gallery, Durban
My paintings consider how we pay attention to the world around us, and limitations in our ability to see and understand things as they are. I suggest that we can grasp the world around us, if only in part, by carefully absorbing intricate details and singular moments.
My work is personal. It speaks of absence and alone-ness, it is a tender yet critical look at my heritage and its cultural spaces. Rural churches, abandoned farmhouses and dejected inner-city buildings go unnoticed but captured in dusk’s oblique, filtered sunlight, they are transformed into magical, meaningful scenes.
Liminal interior spaces become loaded expressions of the intricacy and frailty of the human psyche. In the buildings I explore, mid-century pressed glass windows serve to obscure rather than to reveal, as light is allowed to enter but vision of the outside world is blocked. I am intrigued by the dualities of windows and mirrors, those thin edges between the real and its reflection, exterior and interior, the known and the hidden... My technical explorations of the theme and application of paint reflect this duality. These paintings range from thinly layered translucent images revealing the stark geometry of architectural spaces, to sensuously thick impasto abstractions.
Through this intimate and intense meditation on interior details, I aim to transport you to quiet, introspective spaces where you can pause, absorb, and reflect.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.”
The Holy Bible: 1 Corinthians 13:12. (KJV & NIT)
Spier Creative Blocks Project
ORDINARY LIGHT
With Melissa Tabisher
2022, Art B, Bellville, Cape Town
&
UNDER THE SURFACE
with Dr. Gwenneth Miller & Philip Badenhorst
2022, White River Gallery, White River
Through these photorealistic oil paintings, I wish to share with the viewer moments when I found exceptional beauty within ordinary surroundings. Afternoon sunlight transformed these fragments of commonplace interiors into vignettes of significance. The play of filtered, coloured light on polished wood, wallpaper, carpet, and draped cloth, altered these mundane scenes into something special, even magical. For a fleeting moment, they held all my attention and filled my being. They became spaces to pause in, to absorb and reflect on the beauty hiding in the seemingly trivial details of everyday living.
Farmhouse I & II specifically speak of liminal and transitory spaces. Cropped views of an old rural house, in the process of being abandoned, remind the viewer of loss and absence. These themes are also apparent in Green Kitchen I & II, which depict details from my grandparents' house.
Farmhouse Bathroom
Mandy's Bathroom - 5 pm
