Ancestral houses
August 2023
I am grateful to the Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town and to Emma Van Der Merwe in particular for an invitation to exhibit in their gallery in August 2023. It afforded me the opportunity to experiment and to forge the connections between my painterly sensibility, art history and the materiality of my forty years working in a clay based practice.
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
There are a great many artist’s whose works have entrained my eye and heart and particular works stay in my retinal memory. I chose just a few artists for the various ways in which they have contributed to a visual language which invokes the ineffable. Their works with colour and with substance created cultural artefacts which left a social, spiritual and material residue in the world.
I also pay homage to my beloved materials, the creatures which compacted to make translucent porcelain, the rocks which form the darker clays and in no small measure, I pay homage to various teachers over my lifetime whose examples and knowledge have been generously shared and who serve as guides.
