Sound Still
UCT Irma Stern Museum 29 August - 16 September 2006

Home Exhibition Details Participants On curating Opening address Catalogue

Opening Address
by Anne Emslie. 28th August 2006

Background to the exhibition

This is no ordinary exhibition

It begs an opening of mind, an embrace of sensory and of human interconnectedness; and a paying of homage to the individual voices of the many artists who make up this choir. It is a choir that sings an arresting and unusual song. It is a song that gains complexity and interest because of unison.Alone the voices are each unique and interesting. Together they gather the force of echoes in mountain valleys; and together they create the form of the circle. For people all holding hands naturally make circles. And pebbles thrown into still lakes make circles and circles and circles. For this exhibition I like the image of the stone, the lake and the ripples. And I like the sound of the plop and the waiting stillness of the lake. I shall come back to this.

So I would advise:

This is a complex and multi-dimensional exhibition. And it is a tribute to Katherine Glenday that this is happening. She is the hub that turned the wheel. I think perhaps that, as a compulsively lateral thinker, she began to find that her porcelain vessels were not containing all the complex dialogues in her head. And one of these dialogues for Katherine is around community. She positions herself and understands herself as part of a larger whole, a larger community, a network of artists and individuals who prod consciousness, support and enlarge each others worlds. And it is in this spirit that this group of artists are exhibiting together.

This is not the time or the place to talk at length about the work. Lyn Smuts has written a most interesting exhibition catalogue and for those who want to understand more, it is a recommended read. Here I simply want to briefly dwell on one important aspect of this exhibition. I shall call this the theme of conversation and collaboration.

The works speak to each other in fascinating ways. There are strands of connectivity. It is a well-known fact that women living under the same roof begin menstruating at the same time of the moon. They find a mutual rhythm. And when objects and events are housed together one is alerted to look out for correspondences and connections and the keeping of timing.

Some of the correspondences are as a result of working collaborations that happened in the process of making. Take for example the interaction between Katherine Glenday and Lyn Smuts and John Turest Swartz.There was a shared interest in sound.

Katherine had been making work to draw attention to the musical sounds of high-fired porcelain. Porcelain vessels, like crystal goblets, are capable of emitting an arresting quality of sound. I remember one clear and cold evening beneath the stars on a farm about a year ago. I was part of a circle of women each holding one of Katherine's snowy vessels and striking the sides as if they were Tibetan prayer bowls or drums. We were playing with the sounds formed by the tensile refinement of the porcelain and modified by the shape and mouth openings of the vessels, beautiful objects in themselves, arising from the swirling whirl of the spinning potters wheel, material manifestations of hand in play with centrifugal energy. As we were playing I thought of the spasmodic ringing of vestry bells, near and far, across a Sunday countryside. Others would have had different associations.

John, amongst other capabilities and interests, is a sound archivist and musician. Using notes emitted by ringing the bowls and combining these with the mellow voice of a cello, he has composed a track, giving the sounds his own interpretation; and using them in the creation of an art piece that takes some of its inspiration and its building blocks from other art pieces, namely the ceramic vessels of Katherine and the musician's bow, used by Lyn in the creation of her sound patterns (a process I shall now describe). A conversation between artists is being built, one artist's work answering and responding to another.

And so Katherine's conversation continues in another direction with Lyn Smuts. Lyn had been working with etching plates, capturing the patterns created when a musician's bow was drawn across an edge of the plate sprinkled with fine grains. Together they began to capture these sound structures into the wet surface of porcelain slabs that absorbed the coloured oxides they used as powder. And then the slabs were fired and the sound, if you like, became fossilized in the stone tablet of the high fired porcelain in visual form. And each sound pattern is also a mandala, Jungian image of psychic intergration, moving out from its own centre.

And so another voice enters the conversation. The voice of ceramic artist Christina Bryer, who, working with her aperiodic five point geometries, creates mandala movements of infinite variation and endlessly mutating complexity. Five point geometry is the geometry of DNA. It is the geometry of life. It holds in its structure the mathematics of living things. It has lungs that breath and a heart that beats. And in visual form it curiously resembles the patterns on a tortoise back or some animal pelts; also the patterns on shells.And the heartbeat that arises from five point geometry is the metronome of life, The grid against which as human beings we surely instinctively structure sound. We are back to sound. As Katherine's vessels have a connection with sound, so in another way, as visual representation, as a form of coding, do Christina's geometries. And perhaps it is not accidental that some of Lyn's sound patterns also remind me of animal markings. There is one that I cannot see without thinking of the pellet of a zebra. And it is a fact that just as life never repeats itself without difference and variety, no two zebra pelts are ever identical. We are reminded by much of this work that pattern arises from precise constellations of energy; that pattern has mathematical equivalence; that pattern can take on the mantle of visual form; that pattern can take on the mantle of sound form. And that beneath all form, at base, is energy and vibration. And all is connected.

Then there are other conversations between the work of Katherine and the work of Christina, both experts in porcelain, both working with alchemical transformations of matter subjected to the searing forces of white hot fire. And the work of both artists has an affinity with the sea and with sea-forms. Both, living at the edge of the ocean have breathed in and distilled the varied rhythm of the waves and the offerings of shells and other life from the deep left by the tides on the white crescents of sand and shore. Whatever else it is, Christina's work is also shell and sea and the pounding of the surf. So is Katherine's.

And so another conversation is struck up. For the pounding of heartbeats and waves and other rhythms is intrinsic in a still form in the work of Claire, whose sculptural constructions speak of the urge to pattern sound and make music. Also in the work of Claire is the urge to make visual-music and sound-pattern from words and mark making. And sometimes her words and her marks fall across a page, like dancers moving in a choreographed dance.

And now yet another conversation is struck up in the work of Lore who transcribes the movement of dancers moving to music. We see another sort of equivalence. Another version of translation from one medium into another, one manifestation of expression being sifted through another mesh and emerging as another substance, another way of capturing experience, of creating language, of containing thought and feeling, of encapsulating response. And this process, too, is intricately connected to the heartbeat of life, the human body and the ear's response to sound and to music. Lore enscripts the dance. The dance enscripts the music. And each piece of music enscripts something else, born out of the fabric of sound and stillness, out of the patterning of thought and emotion, out of the emotion of pattern. It is all a complex and interconnected web.These are different ways of framing experience. Perhaps this is one of the functions of the artist. Katherine suggested this to me as she was washing the salad lettuce in her kitchen on Saturday. Artists frame experience. They hold up viewfinders of different shapes and sizes to allow people to glimpse different realities and experience life in ways that are fresh and new and different from what they have previously known and thought and felt. Artists are the shamans of our society. They work magic. They shift realities. They knot up all the silk scarves and with a sleight of hand they are all un-knotted again and we do not know how it was done. They pull rabbits out of top hats and pigeons out of pockets. They create life. Or at the very least, they remind us that we are alive. And how else are artists to achieve this except by the way they live their own lives and the manner in which they go about their art making. The making of magic is embedded in process. And this brings me to another conversation that is happening here. It is a conversation around process. It takes many forms. I shall mention one that arises between the work of Lore and Christina.

Both artists allow their work to arise from a type of ritual observance of centred meditation like practice; of the sort that artists devise in order for work to be born. Christina's method of creating a platter is akin to a meditation practice. Lore's transcriptions of the dance are akin to a temple practice. Both are held and constrained and disciplined by time and timing. In Christina's case the porcelain is an exacting and difficult medium that needs to be worked with precision according to how wet or dry it is. What can be done in hour five should not be attempted in hour one. What was not done in hour one is now lost and cannot be reclaimed or attempted. In Lore's work the dance goes on the music unfolds. The response is in the moment. The translator is required to have extraordinary poise and presence as the dance gets transcribed into script-like figures. What is recorded represents moments in time and travelling movements in space. The translator has one chance.We are reminded that product is the outcome of process and that the work arises from observance in the moment and from being alive and responsive to material and to life.

And then there is the skilful conversation that Mirjam set up between all the artists. This was partly done through the technique of the combining of materials. Mono prints were made using oil paints and paper, and oil paints and porcelain clay sheets. Mirjam who is a process facilitator was asked by the group to devise a method of linking the contributions and helping the contributors to clarify the role they played in the group.

Collaborations can take artists into new directions and they create exciting dialogues between people and their themes and their media.

I was part of a group who were sitting on Katherine Glenday's stoep, overlooking the Kalk Bay harbour, on Saturday afternoon. Lore was conversing about her work. She mentioned that when she was in China she had shown some of her scrolls. A Chinese man had remarked that one of her calligraphic figures was a Chinese sign that signified a mother about to give birth.

This exhibition reminds us that, each of us, connecting in our own and unique manner with the clues that this exhibition offers us, of a secretive and marvellous universe, is in himself or herself the sign of the birthing mother. And each of us as we respond to the works on the walls, converse with the pots, allow images and emotions to arise to meet the music, and imaginatively are moved by the movements of dancers, as we talk, think, feel and strike up conversations about what is here, are causing another ripple to travel out across lakes of interconnected consciousness.

Each of us is a lake. Each of these works and events has potential to drop like a stone.