EARTH FORMES, Art Formes’ second exhibition at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, presents a meditation on earth through a quartet of artists: Eva Obodo, Astrid Dahl, Martine Jackson, and Ledelle Moe. Earth’s symbolic and material porousness animates the exhibition. Each artist works a facet of the earth: the black blur of charcoal (Obodo), malleable clay (Dahl, Jackson) and moulded concrete (Moe). The textural potentiality of earth is mirrored by its conceptual richness. The word “earth” is stretched by a definitional tension, denoting at once the celestial object and mud.
Both sublime and underfoot, “earth” opens up questions of scale. The Earth is perceived only at a great distance, fragile and blue, suspended in an utter blackness. All the while, earth dirties your clothes. It lies under the foundations of buildings and under tar roads. It gurgles at river banks. It is cleaved by mineshafts. It holds and feeds. It is anthropomorphised as Mother. It is protected like a child and butchered like an animal. It is fecund and yielding, and then it is coarse and impotent. Captured by maps and empires, Earth is a witness.
A common attentiveness to the many possibilities of terrain unifies Jackson, Obodo, Dahl, and Moe. The work of each responds to environments across antonyms: urban and rural, idyllic and devastated, enduring and collapsing. The pieces curated in this exhibition are at once representative of natural forms and embodied by the offcuts of earth: clay, charcoal, and concrete. Jackson’s earthenware is embedded with her memories of winding travels, mimicking sand and rock, undulating like cured cowhide. Obodo constructs maps to destroyed homelands through works made from charcoal bundles and haunted by the socio-economic history of mining in Nigeria. Their flatness at once evokes the visual language of cartography and produces a god’s-eye-view of an imaginary landscape. Dahl creates bonelike botanicals. She is concerned with the small-scale extension of earth – the immaculate geometry of flowers. Moe’s work references the cityscape and the spirit world, pulling faces from concrete. Her material is corrupted, transformed earth matter that elicits human-designed landscapes, and perhaps the futile desire to separate from earth.
From the primordial to the modernist, EARTH FORMES collects landscapes of affect. Drawing from multiple locales, the exhibition allows the earth-bound practices of each artist to find resonance with one another in an epoch of earthly frailty.
