"Space" and "place" are familiar words denoting common experiences. The eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977:3) says that "We live in space. ... Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. ... Geographers study places. Planners would like to evoke 'a sense of place'. These are unexceptional ways of speaking. Space and place are basic components of the lived world: we take them for granted."

Terra firma is the first in a series of curated exhibitions that explore the relationship of the self to place, land, soil or earth. It attempts to uncover how we relate and emotionally attach ourselves to the land, and how we project hope, expectations and even our identity on a piece of earth. However, for many people the dream to own a piece of land - even a teensy little piece - remains forever unfulfilled. The desire to be attached to land reflects something of inside/outside condition - being in the body and moving out of the body. It becomes a mapping of the self as a search for a place to belong, an earthy patch of soil where we feel at home since it is a place we can simply be without the pressures of the workplace and relationships with other people. It becomes a dialectic of being divided where the self  is constantly moving beyond itself and outside itself, driven by the desire to be attached to the land, almost like the infant longs for the mother. Terra firma is therefore also mother earth, a solid entity that is familiar since it is natural, non-artificial, reminding us of our short life here on earth, but also of the natural body as life-giving and productive. In Leana van der Merwe's work, constructed of earbuds and nappies, there is an exploration of the female body as colonised 'virgin land' as articulated through male desire and power. The work plays with metaphors of mapping, borders and  the intersection of the natural and the cultural. Tuan (1977:16-17) argues that the human mind discerns geometric designs and principles of spatial organisation in the environment, such as finding circular patterns in birds' nests and the course of the stars, and applies these to the circle of life-death.

Many places that are profoundly significant  to particular individuals, have little visual prominence (Tuan 1977:162) and are often known intuitively. The artist draws attention to such places as metaphors and gives it prominence and meaning. Marili de Weerdt interprets the theme of Terra Firma as a solid mass and a surface that goes beyond the crust of the earth to the filled space underneath which harbours life as well as death. Her work explores the partition between what lies above and underneath it and she attempts to offer a cross section of the earth’s surface and all the secrets it harbours. Clare Menck depicts very familiar and ordinary places - very South African places - determined by subjectivity and personal association. Although reminding of baroque Brueghel-style domesticity, her rendering of shy Afrikaner girls in 'kappies' contains a tension suggesting that something is about to happen any minute, maybe induced by repressive social structures. Yet, at the same time, her exploration of identity and inner worlds in relation to the landscape reminds of the neo-romantic ruralists of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Samuel Palmer, speaking about being caught up in an own small world and a desire for some inexplicable something else.

Yet, whilst terra firma is an endless source of wonder and marvel in terms of the spectacularity of the natural world, as planet earth it has seen the history of the world from the beginning of time. It carries the scars of time having been witness and victim to a plethora of battles, wars and  deaths; it has borne the brunt of endless construction, digging and manufacture; and it is suffocating in the smoky polluting emissions of humanly devised technologies. In Jenna Burchell's work, the creation of a metaphoric reed field serves to comment on how urbanity dominates and takes over the natural. It questions how this foreseeable change from the natural to the urban inflicts changes onto human beings as individuals. In similar way Isabel Mertz presents post-apocalyptic visions of disintegrating cities collapsing into mounds of soil-like heaps, half-building, half-earth. Ironic comments are built into the half-broken bronze works that defy ideas of neatly engineered systems and utopian ideas of progress through technology.

David Koloane, the tribute artist on the exhibition, presents a series of mixed media works in which his legendary style of gestural mark making itself becomes a comment on time passing, transformation, transitivity and the fleeting lifespan of living things on earth. Cars are 'flying in the streets', birds are in flight and people on horses are on their way. In the late 1970s, Koloane co-founded Johannesburg’s first black art gallery, he was the head of Fine Arts at the Federative Union of Black Artists (FUBA) and was instrumental in establishing studio space for black artists at The Fordsburg Artists Studios (The Bag Factory) where he still works today.

Koloane's work has been shown in South Africa, Botswana, France, the United States, the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe, and he has participated in many solo exhibitions as well as group shows. Koloane is the subject of TAXI-006 David Koloane, from the TAXI Art Book series, and his work is found in many collections both locally and internationally. He was invited to curate the South African section in the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1995) that was later shown at the Guggenheim in New York (1996).

Koloane has been recognised and honoured internationally for his contribution to the visual arts in South Africa. 

 

 

Elfriede Dreyer. Pretoria,  January 2012.

 

Source quoted: Tuan, Y-F.1977. Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis/London: University of Minneapolis Press.