Art Formes
February 2024
Investec Cape Town Art Fair
Moth Sentinels, evocations of illumination.
This work come from a love of moths and a sense of precarious, and disrespectful human presences within the ecosystem.
People who first worked on the earth with clay and fire made functional objects. Evocations of the ineffable were part of that functionality. Over the past two hundred and fifty years, clay objects began to greatly proliferate around the world, masquerading as objects of status and accumulated wealth.
Colonial expansion brought porcelain past the Cape of Africa where my forbears first landed. From a salvaged wreck Blanc de Chine figurines of Guan Yin came into my awareness. These goddesses of compassion invoke the feminine spirit and the divine. Their flowing, wing like garments could sweep away the failing structures of our disorientated culture with compassion and mercy.
In this work, the truth of construction shows. Perceptions need to be disassembled, assumptions re-evaluated. We are nature. I look at moths and other winged insects who come and go in the cadence of light and dark and I try to evoke them as beings.
The threat to moths is our unwillingness to let night be night. The light we have cast is not true light.