Having emerged from a period of endless introspection, a haze of thoughts and emotions, and an extra-ordinary cycle of extended creativity, the unknown, the known, the materials and creativity that inhabits our silences, our dreams, our conversations with ourselves, and at times others.
The seasons we have moved through this year, listening to the rain and the cracks of thunder and lightning as I write this, I try to put my hand out and remember how these past 18 months have been defined and shaped.
It is unclear to me, my memory is confused, and fuses creativity, dreaming, making, and silence with myself into a tapestry of interesting textures, surfaces I have not had the privilege to create almost ever. Maybe when I was very young, and there were different pressures on me, but not for a very long time.
What we have just moved through, has been a series of seasons, undefined like the past, waves of solitude, and reflection, which has given us the chance to make, construct and create in a way we haven’t done for a very long time.
Over this time, my husband Cornelius and I have built a new creative space, behind our gallery on Jan Smuts Avenue, in Johannesburg. It has taken us 17 months to construct. It has been our activity of hope and creativity, in this challenging time.
It is almost complete and ready to welcome the activity that will give it a living patina that will make it a place to spend time in, in which to have creative conversations, and sometimes just give one a light, peaceful space to sit and Make, without words as the defining expression.
A space suited to creative contemplation.
I know it has not been a year, like any other, the linear definition was gone, but family, creativity, and being with ourselves, inner reflections have taken the place of previous activities that we previously gave importance to.
Everything has changed.
Escaping into making as a way of hearing our inner voices, and manifesting our dreams and our dancing meanderings. A time of re-configuration, re-calibration, re-imagining ourselves moving forward.
We were forced to stop for the first time in our memory and not go out of our homes. Our worlds grew smaller,
Our creativity was given a chance to move all over the space that our imaginations inhabit.
The results of these meanderings have been very thought-provoking.
To do anything other than look inwards, and be creative. To dig deep, to find our stillness, to look at ourselves, what makes us tick, happy, peaceful, agitated, These factors are what prompted me to curate this exhibition.
Hopefully, it will be food for more thought.
