GERHARD MARX: Thin Places

Everard Read Cape Town is pleased to present a new solo exhibition, 'Thin Places' by Gerhard Marx.

Artist walkabout: Saturday 24 February - 11am

Opening reception: Wednesday 7th February - 6pm

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Artist statement

Thin Places approaches the idea of landscape with an interest in how the act of representation – through tradition, language, material and tool – shapes and limits the manner in which landscape or environment is perceived and imagined. It works to complicate the visual languages used in transcribing ‘landscape’, with the ambition that this act of complicating the medium would by implication complicate the implied landscape or environment.

Paper is an essential medium to practices of cartography, land surveying, planning, architecture and so forth. Could it be that the physical characteristic of paper itself – its thin, flat surface – forces the surface-orientated view of landscape that has become analogous to the colonial and capitalist project? Could one manipulate that flat language in a manner that would allow for alternate imaginaries that would substitute the flat with the immersive, surface with membrane, with soil, with the subterranean, with the overlapping, the interwoven, with the climatic?

I wanted to make this body of work from within the rich soil of what Amitav Gosh calls ‘the crisis of the imagination’. Gosh is referring to how climate concern forces an awareness of such enormity and scale that we are hampered by the difficulty of comprehending and communicating it. The result is a wild bloom of names and nomenclature to enable new ideas, as old terms prove inadequate: the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, the ‘new’ emotion of Solastalgia, etc.

I want to indulge in this bloom of language – there is something of the sublime, something inherently poetic in this space were language grapples to take hold.

The new terminologies all aim to hold new relationships with the environment, to re-describe, or re-cognize and re-interpret the essential experience of ‘being on earth’. Even the act of describing this essential, fundamental state – that of being on earth, cannot be done without complication. Emanuele Coccia suggests that we should find better a name than just ‘earth’ to describe our planet. Bruno Latour questions the use of ‘globe’ as primary metaphor for understanding our planet. Morton questions the very existence of something such as ‘nature’.

My interest here is in the fertile, almost surrealist, slippage between the thing itself and the language that describes that thing. It is a slippage that makes the interplay between perception and description, and how description changes perception, tangible. It is a slippage that says that new words might conjure new things; new images allow you to see new things. It is the same slippage that occurred when the place names were changed in South Africa after the political shift of 1994, from which my first cartographic assemblages were born after the act of renaming made previous cartographies redundant, after maps were redrawn.

‘Thin places’ refers to places where the veil between the metaphysical and the physical is permeable. These are often spaces of pilgrimage, where one can occupy two worlds simultaneously. I refer to this term with an interest in creating work that speaks to the visual tradition of the ‘landscape’, but that does so with an interest in complicating the visual languages used, in order to pursue the new spatial imaginaries that the new nomenclatures ask for.

Drawing

The drawings are speculative, propositional and contemplative. My interest is in drawing as an aspirational tool, in its capacity to draw what is ‘not there yet’, in the manner of pre-sketches, plans, projections and so forth. I am interested in images that grow and sediment through processes of accumulation and contemplation. The drawings are propositional sketches: ways to think through forms of world-making and terra-forming.

The Persian ‘garden carpet’ tradition; the charbach (the fourfold division of the garden and world); the formal garden (and its relationship with the colonial project); and the mappa mundi are redrawn in a manner which subtly counters their intrinsic modernizing, structuring and flattening logic.

When working with the idea of the Hortus Siccus (a scientific collection of preserved and flattened plants, arranged systematically), I focus on the thriving diversity of plants found in interstitial spaces, known as ‘ecotones’. Ecotones are spaces in which different ecologies and plant-worlds meet and overlap. Here I harvest dried plant material and the roots of weeds. I make drawings by embedding the material into a thick, black acrylic bed. In this act of translation, the structuring, schematic lines of the garden carpet and the ancient Greek labyrinth give way to the tentacular and the uncertain. The flat schematic of the floor plan (literally platte grond, ‘flat ground’ in Dutch) opens up to the subterranean, collapsing surface into soil.

When fragmenting and reassembling cartographies, I focus on geometries and compositions that favour layering, repetition, multiplicity and dimensionality to counter the singularizing and individuating compulsion of scientific and cartographic description.

Sculpture

The sculptural forms continue an interest in sculpture as a spatial event, in creating an object that affects the viewer’s relation to the space around them. It is a longstanding interest in creating objects that are ‘landscapes’; more dimensional than ‘thing’, more spatial than ‘object’. This comes from an interest in the impossible project of making the experience of distance, vastness and absence present in a tangible object.

My focus is on the granular: on how small rocks and pebbles sit on the surface of the Earth. On the non-human forces and greater timeframes that determine their seemingly arbitrary placement, and the gentle pull of gravity that they make visible. I selected a remote location in the vast Karoo landscape, where there was no sense that the placement of stones was affected by human activity, where these larger forces and greater timeframes felt tangible. I spent time there to carefully select small compositions of rocks, around which I placed wooden frames and into which I poured silicone to make an imprint – a tile. While watching the moulds dry and then lifting these imprints off the Earth’s surface, it felt like I was developing daguerreotypes or contact prints – long exposure photographs composed of texture and touch.

The shape of the tiles is based on a cartographic idea. The disembodied view of the cartographic eye (in the sky) gives us the perfect squares of the longitudinal and latitudinal grid. If that eye is brought down to earth, into an embodied and grounded point of view that implies a subjectivity, it results in a parallelogram; the effect of seeing the square from its side. There is a visual reference here to Roger Penrose’s aperiodic tiling pattern (which mirrors Islamic tiling geometries and carries the illusion of dimensionality in its flat geometry), and to Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Dymaxion Projection’ (a reinterpretation of the projection of the Earth’s spherical surface onto a flat surface for cartographic purposes). Fuller’s reinterpretation of the globe aims to correct the distortions and misinterpretations inherent in the shape we use to visualise our planet.

The parallelogram is strangely haunted by the square and the cube. In Penrose’s tiling, as with Islamic tiling patterns, three parallelograms interlock to suggest more than two dimensions; a three dimensional cube seems to hover within the flat tiling pattern. However, when the parallelogram is placed in space, there is the illusion of seeing the square at an angle, the viewer’s sense of perspective is subtly affected, the object strangely does not cohere comfortably to one’s expectation of how space unfolds.  

In reassembling these landscapes, I bring a different place to the place in which the sculpture stands. It is a physical ‘elsewhere’. But I do not offer a solid, flat surface. Instead of Penrose’s infinite flat, almost cartographic surface, these surfaces unfold into dimensionality with an origami-like dance. It is a projection that is fleeting, formless and unsettled. It is no longer static, but caught in motion.

Structurally the question to myself was ‘How would a map stand itself up?’ The implication is that the background is foregrounded, that context gains agency, that the landscape format lifts itself into portrait format, into the dimensional, into subjectivity. Solid ground lifts and folds and swivels itself into shifting ground, into infinite variable forms.

It is landscape as verb.

Gerhard Marx 2024

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Slater Studio and Michael Hall