August 10, 2024 - September 01, 2024
White River, South Africa
Artist Statement
A Story in Monochrome
I live next to the sea, on Cape Town’s southern peninsula. In this small show of largely monochromatic works, I attempt to distill the essence of where I am living, what I see around me and how I feel in relation to my natural environment.
Our lives are often harried, bombarded by noise, media, turmoil, too much artificial light and hard surfaces, too little privacy. Places of serenity and retreat, where profound restoration can take place, are increasingly hard to come by. The disappearance of wild nature and our limited access to natural environments distances us further and further from this healing, restorative source.
In a way, my works produced over the years are a type of nostalgia, strongly influenced by memories of a very unrestricted childhood landscape in Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal.
The places I frequent daily in Cape Town have made me keenly aware of the tension between the beautiful and the sublime. The eighteenth-century Western aesthetic of the beautiful, in which nature was seen as an emblem of orderly perfection, mirroring the human mind, gave way to the Romantics’ keen awareness of nature’s mystery and otherness, experienced as the sublime. In experiencing the sublime, the human mind becomes aware of the futility of imposing order on the wildness, vastness, mystery and magnificence of nature. In acknowledging that nature is not as pliable or human-centric as it might seem, the sublime offers a path to a spiritual awareness or presence that Wordsworth describes as ‘intimations of immortality.’
I try to show this tension between the beautiful and the sublime in my work – depicting what lies on the edge of, behind or beyond the natural world I see around me. In experiencing the sublime, I become aware of the spiritual potency of the natural world, described by the Celts as a thin place, where the veil between the physical and spiritual becomes permeable. This sense of being in a thin place can attest to the healing power of the natural world, a world in which one could transition into an ‘in-between’ place, with alternate possibilities.
Laurel Holmes, 2024