CUBICLE Series August 2023

Cubicle is an ongoing platform at CIRCA Cape Town, giving artists scope to exhibit smaller bodies of artworks and site-specific installations for a two week period.

Featuring:

ZARAH CASSIM | CURIOSITIES / PERCEPTION

KAREN ELKINGTON  | STORYLINES

KATHERINE GLENDAY | ANCESTRAL HOUSES

WONDER MARTHINUS | CONTEMPLATION OF DREAMS

CHELSEA ANN PETER | GENESIS IS A WOMB

ELLYN PRETORIUS | SOLASTALGIA: A PARAFICTIONAL NARRATIVE

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Artist walkabout: Saturday 19 August - 10am

Art Formes book launch: Wednesday 16 August - 6pm

https://www.artformes.com/

Installation images by Michael Hall 

ZARAH CASSIM | CURIOSITIES / PERCEPTION

In darkness, tiny pops of light glow. Rich colours of emerald, marigold and pomegranate fill the space. Shadows excite curiosity as shapes and forms shift ambiguously. Perception forms an intimate landscape, where what is gleaned from the abstracted shapes becomes a uniquely personal response.

My practice is influenced by fragments of memories, colours, natural shapes and forms that exist in my life. For this particular body of work, I have explored the physical texture and form of the surface materials I work with. In contrast to the constructed stitched works on linen – where raw edges and imperfections are exposed – I have also explored the mark-making method of traditional silk painting, which is delicate and transparent.

KAREN ELKINGTON  | STORYLINES

Storylines refers both to a particular storyline and to the connection lines we can make between many different peoples’ stories from different places and times. The paintings in this show partly tell my grandmother’s personal story set in colonial Sri Lanka, but are also representative of an archetypal story of resilience.

My grandmother Mary was the daughter of Mariamah, a Sri Lankan tea plantation worker, and John Loudon, a Scottish colonialist who had gone to Sri Lanka to make his fortune in the tea industry. With the flawed thinking prevalent in the early 20th century, and empowered by laws and wealth, this man left my grandmother in an orphanage set up by a missionary. I recently visited the orphanage, and found Loudon’s letters forbidding Mariamah from ever visiting her daughter, as well as my grandmother’s letters detailing some of her struggles. The houses in the paintings are specific to the Sri Lankan tea region of Nuwara Eliya and the old colonial town of Galle. However, these buildings imposing on their surroundings also serve to symbolise power structures found everywhere.

Many humans are born into social, political and economic systems that dictate their lives and mean they cannot live as they might wish, with their loved ones free of external threats. Storylines weaves a path between a sense of hope and an understanding of despair, between exuberance and oppression, between lightness and darkness. It is a much travelled path.

KATHERINE GLENDAY | ANCESTRAL HOUSES

In this collection of works, I have made small groupings of coloured clay vessels and assembled them into tableaux. These are homages to various artists both current and from history who form part of the ancestral inheritance found in my own work. Some of the artists we have no names for, but their work remains.

I also pay homage to my beloved materials, the creatures which compacted to make translucent porcelain and the rocks which form the darker clays. In no small measure, I pay homage to my various teachers whose knowledge has been generously shared and which has served as a guide in honing my own process and vocabulary.

There are many artists whose works have made imprints on me, remaining in my retinal memory. I chose only a few here. I chose them for the hues they work in, and for the various ways in which they have contributed to a visual language invoking the ineffable. Their works with colour and substance combine to create artefacts which have left a spiritual, material and social residue.

WONDER MARTHINUS | CONTEMPLATION OF DREAMS

My work mostly deals with actualities of what is in front of me: what I see, where I am, and how I orientate myself through my day by drawing, photographing, and painting. In essence, my work encapsulates what draws my attention, with the shifting perception of hind-sight once information is carried back with me to the studio.

During the lockdowns of Covid-19, my only real contact at that time was with two other artists (Neena Borrill and Tosca Marthinus). Our conversations ranged from humanity and philosophy to politics and photography – and the meaning of relevance during that period. We set up a drawing class in studio, staging different arrangements and settings inspired by early Expressionist work. Neena Borrill became my model. With our conversations starting during Covid, my approach widened further. In The Daydream, for example, I reference The Nightmare, a 1781 painting by Henry Fuseli. In my approach, I have shifted things around. Included here are some delicious monster plants that I moved around my studio to create a stage where my work can start. Lilith is a reference to Goethe’s Faust, and the painted characters are often dolls that I have collected from the streets as I walk. They serve as critics in my studio – my Greek Chorus.

CHELSEA ANN PETER | GENESIS IS A WOMB

Embracing the allure of magic realism, Genesis is a Womb submerges one in a realm where oil paintings come alive. Brushstrokes weave a tapestry rooted in ancient mythology, dreams, storytelling – a veneration of worlds, existing or imagined, before patriarchy and colonisation.

Each painting asks us to confront the violence embedded within patriarchal structures, while heralding a renaissance of the feminine spirit. The ambition is to create a space where artworks can become vessels for liberation and transcendence through self-reflection and eager enquiry. Transcending their materiality, the paintings serve as portals that extend an invitation to traverse the depths of unseen universal forces, where light and dark are interwoven tightly.

Existing alongside the paintings is an improvised, experimental soundscape that is performed by the artist. Under the guise of Blue Vow, Peter plays with sound as another dimension of exploring her inner and outer worlds as an attempt to perceive while being realised as a conduit.

ELLYN PRETORIUS | SOLASTALGIA: A PARAFICTIONAL NARRATIVE

This body of work explores solastalgia and the fragmentation of place-based memory through the creation of parafictional architectural constructs. Solastalgia refers to psychological distress caused by changes to either one’s immediate environment or the world. Capturing the beauty of decay as well as creating parafictions is the artist’s personal response to this.

The drypoint intaglio prints illustrate a solastalgic narrative where the cityscapes become increasingly fragmented, and our memories attempt to fill in the blanks. Our attempts to fill negative spaces create parafictions: believable lived experiences where fact and fiction harmoniously overlap. 

The box collections depict unearthed treasures – the reminders we keep of places as they used to be. Photographs were collected of nature rebelling against human presence, such as weeds growing from cracks in concrete. The etching process immutably captures a moment in danger of being eradicated.

How we hold onto and preserve our tangible and intangible place-based memories is integral to the history of our civilisation.