Artworks by Lien Botha (left) and Jaco van Schalkwyk (right) on display side-by-side in After nature. All photographs provided by Lien Botha
After nature is a curated collaboration by lens-based artist Lien Botha and painter Jaco van Schalkwyk. The exhibition is currently on show at Barnard Gallery, Newlands, until 10 October 2023.
At the edge of us is art. We end and wilderness begins in a moment that is art: a feral scream of escaping inspiration. When a forest becomes the sky, those transparent leaves in early golds and reds and all the coming greens on the rim of life offer musical shape, if we care to listen, and we need to listen and then see and remember, for the visual dance is there in birdsong that is part of us, an ancient breeze that connects like a fresco of dawn; we need to rediscover our primordial-ness, and we are whispered to, then, of a future that can only be celebrated as a collection of the very oldest memories; such is the power of art.
We are not art.
Nature is not art.
Art inhabits the in-between.
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Art inhabits the in-between.
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When the hills in the distance over there find the sun beyond the city’s perimeter (beyond every city’s perimeter), free of buildings and fences and glass walls, and freeway-highways, and sharp scar wounds, such hills shift into something else that is a route to a way of seeing, and sandy valleys lift into flowered meadows, then – abundant in life; grassy tufts begin to bend one last time in a slow sculpture, shuttled on birdwings and vibrating insect legs, and that is a transition called art. The gift of the artist – in obligate conviction and love – takes us there, of course, with huge urgency; hinting, framing, illuminating in a choreography of linking that is a reinterpretation of the edge; the celebration of the liminal; an interconnected offering made into an aesthetic story; our desperate story of our last place for hope; our intrinsic belonging; our wild identity fashioned in the words of art.
When the sea hesitates with its breath – wave after wave – there is a rushing light, made of salt that turns a beach into a place for yesterday’s paintings, which are, of course, tomorrow’s. Art – out there, where the land meets the sea, where the sea meets the land, on the line of change: our in-between that is unadulterated creativity.
And if we get up really close to one another, down on our knees, face almost touching face (gathering in a room of images and sounds and shapes, perhaps?), we stand almost as one, inside a language that is a new language, a single thing becoming the next, each of us looking into history and yet into a vastness up ahead, for that is our journey, and it is one of art: an idea dusted off, reconfigured, repositioned, recaptured, like a precious relic from the veld, lit and boxed in glass (a diorama?), detached from us in a way, yet not detached at all: re-seen.
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The work of art is the bridge between us and Nature, between now and then, indeed a teetering link, a last reach of our communal fingers, fragile in the way feathers or twigs or water currents are fragile, fleeting in the way an idea might hover in sunlight and then just disappear ...
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The work of art is the bridge between us and Nature, between now and then, indeed a teetering link, a last reach of our communal fingers, fragile in the way feathers or twigs or water currents are fragile, fleeting in the way an idea might hover in sunlight and then just disappear; or in the manner a thing of joy – the rustle of branches on a breeze – comes almost in a carnal surge that is both love and hate, instinctual in its every colour and touch and scent and sound. A work of art is all that is left then, and it is all that matters. A connection is defined – and then it is gone, or is it?
A work of art redefines a moment.
A work of art redefines circadian time and circadian space.
A work of art is our circadian-ness.
The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger suggests that boundary is the beginning of presencing, a coming-to-presence, the transitioning instant when something becomes something else, which can only exist at a point of change in time; in fact, the very instant of change is itself the world where art lives – and it does live – within a frontier that is the embodiment of all inspiration: the untamed becoming the tamed – Nature becoming After Nature, and After Nature becoming a remnant of us.
In this exhibition, the works of Lien Botha and Jaco van Schalkwyk gesticulate with a message that might want to soar, or gather, or just drift-stretch in complete silence and then sleep-crawl in a rustling breeze, reminiscent of every rhythm inside the natural world. This art captures and then releases relevance, all at once, back and forth – the magnification and reduction of imagery presents the caress and the stroke of seeing, emphasised in a new, unambiguous freedom. Each work is an interaction on the periphery of humanity.
Figures 1 and 2:
Lien Botha, SA Museum, Cape Town, 2009, photographic print on cotton paper.
Jaco van Schalkwyk, Most Blue Skies, 2023, oil on paper. (Images provided by Lien Botha)
Artist speaks to artist here, in a shared searching, too, and they do it for you. Perhaps the very essence of this collaboration is emissarial, for it represents you – us – and bellows on our behalf, this unfurling, this exposure, this showcase of where we are now, our dying curiosity and our wonder on the greatest stage, one last time: our final existence burning in the heat of greed and excess. These artists share so that we might share, so that the dialogue becomes generous and invincible. The plea is for preservation, for conservation, for confrontation, for a last way of looking out and then in.
In this curated collaboration (the word collaboration is intrinsic to art and, in fact, to the philosophy of nature conservation as well, for we are an intricately social creature – a single living thing, actually – that is part of a bigger living matrix), one idea contributes to the next, and within the context of a biological world this is deeply appropriate, for that is how any natural system functions, themes infusing into themes like the land becoming the sea, or a tree the sky, or a bird the next bird, the emphasis ecological and in constant flow: art fertilising art fertilising art.
So rich and fecund is the interaction of these works that it can be said they also transform and multiply, for that is a natural process, too, a metamorphosis of aesthetics.
Figures 3 and 4:
Jaco van Schalkwyk, In Memoriam Konrad 545-FRA 10, 2023, oil on Belgian linen
Lien Botha, In Afterland (Pietro Longhi), 2023, digital photographic construction on cotton rag (Images provided by Lien Botha)
Perhaps, the works are at once dystopian and utopian, entropic and yet negentropic. We cannot taste life without death. We cannot see night without day, or look without blinking, or feel recovery without loss. Art demands urgency at the end, which is of course the beginning, too. Art demands two sides of a thing, maybe even three or four or five. The nostalgia is allowed to rise here and there, but only as a glimpse, a homage to the past, for then we must flee into our own distance, and it’s quite a distance, out there where we have manufactured our end (and it has been our own doing, all the destruction and desolation and deluge), where the edge of our wasted species is now forever altered.
Art is our mirror as much as it is our route of escape.
Collaboration in Nature can be seen as collage, a collected message made of many messages gathered intentionally, image interacting with image in a set, an assortment of installations, an assemblage of points of view that together amplify, a menagerie of the dead put on display for the living as a single gesture of survival, banishing ambiguity.
Figures 5 and 6:
Lien Botha In Afterland (Theophanes), 2023, digital photographic construction on cotton rag
Jaco van Schalkwyk, Menagerie, 2023, oil on Belgian linen (Images provided by Lien Botha)
Nature is collaboration.
Art is collaboration with Nature and Us.
Of course, in art, each work must stand alone, too, on its own terms, defining itself in a sort of juxtaposition that shines, as if a life of the brightest feathers lingers near another life defending territorial ideas, all the while alone yet communal, a requirement as fundamental within the creative moment as blood is to a body, or water to the sea.
In pursuit of equilibrium, wilderness exists in a state of change. There can be no valley without a mountain and no mountain without a valley; there can be no sea without rain or rain without sea, no river without the land, and no soaring bird without sky. If we are to retain our place, our life, within this dynamic system, we have to redefine ourselves – and there is not much time left. The thing is, survival is remarkably easy. We just need to banish arrogance and turn to the instinct of art.
- After Nature opened on 31 August and is running until 10 October at Barnard Gallery, Newlands.
Video clip from Sanctuaries (Lien Botha), soundtrack by Conrad Jamneck, voice: Sotalunus, 2023