Beast In A Dangerous Landscape   







Beast Leaves 2012 (installation view)
wool dust and archival glue on paper, each panel 39cm diameter




(click on images to view complete image)

John Berger wrote a story about a lake in which the lake has a voice, a history and a memory of that history.  

It begins ...

“I am an alpine lake. I measure 750 metres by fifty metres. I am about seventy metres deep. One of my neighbours to the west is an alpage called Annely. I am called Falin. I reflect with my eyes shut. When I do this indiscriminately, you, you see dark green, nothing else.”

When asked about the “borderline” between the self and other in the writing process. Berger suggests it is a process of osmosis. 

“That which has become part of one’s own experience and life is already other people ... the self is already collective”.

In the end he, says, he realised the story of the lake is the story of Narcissus “seen from the other point of view. ... For a while I thought I was writing about a lake which was out there, I was writing actually about something that was already inside me, although I was not writing about myself.”

                John Berger, The Act of Approaching, an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis











Beast Well-Clothed  2011

wool dust and archival glue on paper, 55 X 44cm






The crisis-of-the-earth of our age is nothing if not a reflection of humanity’s chaos and muddled thinking.  Our actions say “we cannot tolerate change” while ensuring that change will be total and uncontrollable.  In our relationships with the non-human animals who inhabit the landscape with us, we’ve never advanced very far in terms of  reconciliation but refined and perfected their oppression as if seeking proof of what we regard as our superior position.  

Beast is the spectre of this most ambivalent of relationships.  Beast is my image of internal noise played out as external disturbance. It plays out the dramas that follow when private crises that lie unattended inside leak out and are exposed in shared turmoil.  The landscape around Beast both suffers and causes the effects of it’s crisis.  

Projecting the inside onto the external landscape is something individuals do.  I suspect though there's a parallel that occurs on a grand scale with peoples and nations.  It is a theme common, for instance, in Japanese Art and belief, that destructive events in nature are linked to the unresolved emotional dynamics of individuals and peoples.  Hokusai’s Wave, we know, is not just water.



Bonita Alice 2012








Beast Well-Clothed  2011
wool dust and archival glue on paper, 55 X 44cm








“..contemporary criteria for what counts as moral, sane, and rational make the assertion of intrinsic human inequality and defense of social discrimination universally impossible, let alone illegal. The same is not true for those interested in countering speciesism, whose norms are still a work in progress. ... Care and concern invariably turn into finite quantities, with never enough to go around beyond narrow human interest.”



Kalpana Rahita Seshadri in HumAnimal - Race, Law, Language  2012











Beast Well-Clothed  2011
wool dust and archival glue on paper, 55 X 44cm






Beast Well-Clothed  2011
wool dust and archival glue on paper, 55 X 44cm










Divine Acts And Errors Of Judgement  2010
acrylic paint on paper, each panel 37cm diameter




Derrida proposed that, contrary to the idea that nature mourns it’s muteness, rather it is nature’s melancholy that renders it mute.

“... a mute but audible lament through sensuous sighing and even the rustling of plants...”

Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am







Nothing Remained But Dry Stone And A Vague Idea In The Minds Of Its People  2010
wool dust and archival glue on paper
triptych approx 69cm H







Treachery, Lies And Lamentation   2012
wool dust and archival glue on paper
each panel approx 37cm diameter








Folly, Deceit And The Risk Of Thunder  (installation view)  2012
wool dust and archival glue on paper
each panel approx 37cm diameter








Beast, Enraged, Rises And Becomes Vapour  (installation view)  2012
wool dust and archival glue on paper
each panel approx 37cm diameter










Untitled (Landscape)  2011
watercolour, 51 X 34cm







Untitled (Landscape)  2011
watercolour, 41X50cm








Eulogy And Euphemism  (studio view)   2011
watercolour  each approx 35cm diameter








The Stallions  (installation view)  2012
watercolour (pairs) each panel 41 X 31cm 





















The Stallions   (pairs - installation views)









The Stallions (detail)







Beast In A Dangerous Landscape, Gallery AOP, installation view






 Beast Leaves  1012, Gallery AOP, installation view






Beast In A Dangerous Landscape, Gallery AOP, installation view






 3 Folded Canvases   2011  (installation view)
oil on canvas, each approx 15- 20cm 






Beast In A Dangerous Landscape, Gallery AOP, installation view




Beast in a Dangerous Landscape, AOP, Johannesburg, October  2012

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