Art Formes presents Iterations of Earth: Exploring Multitudes — a revolving group show pushing boundaries around earth as a medium for sculptural expression. The artworks curated in this exhibition are at once representative of natural forms and embodied by the offcuts of earth: clay, charcoal, and concrete. Drawing from multiple locales, artists originating from various parts of the South African landscape and Nigeria, the exhibition allows the earth-bound practices of each artist to find resonance with one another in an epoch of earthly frailty. The exhibition includes ceramic masters Clive Sithole, Astrid Dahl, Sbonelo Luthuli and Martine Jackson. In addition to air-dried sculptures by Jo Roets, carved concrete and earth with sculptor Ledelle Moe and charcoal works by Nigerian artist Eva Obodo.
Clay
The urge to unite the primordial matter of earth with the species-defining discovery of fire is an age-old impulse. Configurations of silica, feldspar, kaolin, iron, titanium, and igneous rock are altered in the furnace, becoming the variable bodies of ceramic. They are sometimes like the skin of an angel — cold, glazed, and smooth to the touch — sometimes burnished and warm, sometimes coarse and undulating.
In the Dogon Country, ancient ceramics from the early 10th millennium BCE bear traces of novel patterns of human cooperation for the harvest. In the Xianrendong cave in China, fragments of pots dated to 18,000–17,000 BCE once cultivated rice. Ancient Egyptian pottery was placed in tombs as offerings to the dead. Ceramic shards in the ground are memories — of ancestral bodies, beliefs, rituals, and visual language — leading us towards the impulses we have in common with bygone people. We are bound by the ceramic process in a fundamental gesture born from the desire to solidify and hold the world.
Concrete
Grey utopian dreams crowd the horizon. The substance of modernism, Soviet cities, bank fronts, municipal towers, mausoleums, the weighty persistence of transformed earth. Heavy, sound-swallowing, sky-breaking.
Concrete moves between conceptual categories. While it is the emblem of the modern world, it is enduringly earthbound and ancient, recalling architecture’s beginnings in the mud. Before the dawn of modernity, ancient Egyptians made mortars from gypsum and lime and a recipe for concrete made from pozzolana and chunks of volcanic rock was recorded by architect Vitruvius in the first century BCE. While it incorporates industrially produced substances – steel and cement – it is bound with fundamental materials – sand, crushed rock, water. So, concrete is a substance always doubled, haunted by its shadow. Artificial-natural, rough-smooth, malleable-inert, liquid-solid, archaic-cutting-edge. A “mongrel material”, was the formulation of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Charcoal
It is a residue. The burnt remains of plant and animal matter. A fossil of fire. In the body of the conflagration, it has transformed. Churning in a ravenous redness, in the rush of the burn, in the plasmatic scream, the memories of before wasted away. The tree that bent in the wind, with nests of life sheltered in the crotch of its branches, perishes. The dead-plant soil of the marshland is worn by the flame. The black rock of prehistoric plant remains is metamorphosed again. The bone that gave shape and axis to the body, is softened to black. The fire suffocates matter and leaves in its wake an unutterable blackness: the force that swallows stars.
Between the roaring quiet of the universe and the graze of velvet against skin, in the heath in urban Africa, in city lights burning holes into the darkness, in the sfumato wash of Leonardo Da Vinci’s studies, in the blacksmith’s forge, in mounting piles, in kilometres of beheaded trees, expanding from a time before history to a claustrophobic present, charcoal is a human companion.
