Still, life is a play on the notion of the still life as a piece of the outside brought inside and interpreted by an artist. It is an interesting cycle – bringing the outside in, knowing that inevitably the organic matter would perish but that, as an artist, you would keep it ‘alive’ in the form of a work. In this way, when one looks at the works on show, tangible pieces of life are represented – in colour and form, but also in the acts of creation. Each painting has a link to nature and/or our engagement with it.
Two of the works that really held this cyclical feeling for me are Chloë Reid’s Durational drawing and Stephané Conradie’s Untitled multi-plate etching.
Chloë’s drawing is in itself a meditation – it takes the artist extended time to draw thousands of swarming lines, satiated with colour and movement. Apart from the colours she used, her process is a commitment to the joy of life and life’s integral connection to nature. As a viewer you can describe the feelings it elicits in you: being enveloped by a bunch of flowers, walking a sun-drenched path, stepping into one of Monet’s water-lily paintings, watching reflections on water….
Stephané’s image appears as a more traditional still life. However, the aquatint method of printmaking used blurs many of the individual forms bursting from the container holding them. Before you are quite able to decipher the intriguing ‘flowers’, the vibrancy of the layering encourages your eyes move to another form. You find what could be flowers but could also be people, tools, shadows, steeples and misshapen and unknown forms.
The ‘Still, life’ exhibition is also a meditation on a longing to be outside – to be ‘alive’ in a way which is an antidote to the last few years in which the covid pandemic forced us to spend so much time indoors. While people are ‘inside’, nature lives its course ‘outside’ and we remain engaged with it. I wanted to draw a thread between works that represent that there is (still) life, and that artists bring this to the fore in a consistent act of service through their making. The exhibition is a homage to the outside, but also to people’s experience of the outside, and their resilience.
by Candice Cruse
