Exhibition Text (May, 2009)

Archives

An archivist, by process of categorically uprooting corporeal forms, eludes the importance of their present existence. For posterity, an archivist employs methods for preserving these forms – to treat their temporal complex. This, an archivist must always do in order to revere an anterior moment. For there to be any reverence of an archive, a substantial length of time must precede its introduction into this world. This code pre-exists. Archives are remnants and markers which have been part-excavated from a plane of history and part precariously composed to become new, rejuvenated markers, affirming a historicity. An archivist must fictionalise and an archive is their fiction – a novel reanimation of an excavated time – an incision, ergo, an alteration, made on the surface of a plane of history that disrupts a notional time-flow continuum.  In the space of an archive, forms stagnate unexceptionally – neither degrading exclusively nor preserving. A space that permits memory, whilst denying its contingency. A space that strangles memory. To archive is to postpone a moment in time.

        ‘…Because I know that time is always time
        And place is always and only place
        And what is actual is actual only for one time
        And only for one place…’  

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1991.



Above: My mother’s hands clasping an abundance of lettuce, along with craddling a lemon from her garden, in preparation for the evening’s salad. 

On reflection (March, 2025)

Much in the way that I think of a story told to me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s realisation that his autobiography, Mirror (1975), which was intended to be a gaze through his mind and memories from childhood, and yet instead he finished the project only to discover that it was a biography of the interiority of his mother’s experiences; I too have come to find a much gentler and somewhat reflective perspective on this exhibition, once coldly titled (perhaps as a placeholder for a later time) Archives (August, 2009), memories have come flooding back of where the work’s conception arose. Many years ago, my mother, Ramola, perhaps in her late 30s to early 40s, and myself, as a young, sensitive child at the age of somewhere between six to nine years of age, would spend  afternoons flipping through her old books to discover pressed leaves from travels to Switzerland, Scotland, and England, with each leaf carrying the fragility of age and damage from storage in novels and medical textbooks. For her, she was escaping the clutches of Apartheid South Africa, her home environment, and journeying across the world, collecting fleeting wonders along her path. That memory stayed with me, and had significant personal importance for how we carry past moments through objects, and yet those mysterious objects had changed, not just in themselves, but the conditions of their preservation – one could take one glance at each book and see the distortion of pages and warping of the object itself, and know that there was some hidden fragment from the past. She returned to her home in Cape Town with those leaves, only to pack them and again take them with her to Sydney, Australia.

Once my mother and father made it to the safety of Australian soil, she went on to painting flower motifs in the Bauernmalerei styles, clearly influenced by her time spent in Switzerland. For years she worked explored this stylisation, and only in later years to turning to the discipline of painting in the sytle of Botanical Art. Simultaneously, she worked tirelessly to develop a mysterious and wondrous home garden on our quarter achre of land. Each season, life would take shape and she would draw inspiration from the unfolding growth. She would always marvel at the way life took its own course. Which reminds me of an old Chinese word, now a part of the Mandarin cannon, 自然 (Zìrán), for which there is no equivelant in the English language, meaning ‘is of itself so’. She would plant the seed, water, feed, and life would unfold on its own accord, season after season, year after year.

It seems only natural that I followed in her in collaboration of sorts – building a flower press, selecting the right flowers in bloom, and collecting fallen branches. The show at George Paton Gallery was to become my first solo exhibition.

I am writing this from in St Vincent’s Hospital’s pallaitive ward, where my dear mother is unconscious, deep in a sleep state, with perhaps hours or days before she passes. I have always intended to write this note, but the nature of her condition has given me clarity and decisiveness.

To be included below, in time, will be a series of my mother’s botanical works, and perhaps even a series of her pressed leaves.