Rachel Ferriman
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The myth of Persephone in the Underworld speaks of the seasons: there are the months of growth, abundance and harvest; and the days of dying back, disappearance and dormancy; life moves towards death which leads back to life again; life and death form a complete circular whole. The pomegranate in my painting refers to how Persephone succumbed to eating six pomegranate seeds in Hades. She must have been very thirsty and was fooled by the seemingly innocuous pomegranate seeds. One of the pieces of plate has 'panted' written on it. I realized that the plate must have broken after the word 'hand' and the person painting the word forgot to insert the 'i' into 'painted'. These sorts of coincidences occur often in my work, and seem to be signs that I am on the right path.
Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the seat of the soul. The brain was not considered by them to be of any importance and instead of carefully preserving it in mummies, as they did other organs, they inserted a long needle up the nose to mash it so that it could be drained out of the head and disposed of. Modern medicine, in contrast, proclaims the supremacy of the brain: the brain is considered to be where we as human beings exist - and where we begin and end. There seems to be a juxtaposition of heart as instinct and emotion and brain as intelligence and logic. It is interesting to me how a person can live many years with a damaged brain and a good heart, but no matter how healthy one's brain is, if the heart is diseased, the whole body dies.
'Seat of the Soul' is a self-portrait started by doing a body print with face paint on fabric. I repainted my face and hands in oils, and attached hair and other items like a fabric heart, an actual rib (of a goat, I think). It is about mortality and the notion of the soul as the essential and eternal part of a human being.
Overheard on a Saltmarsh
by Harold Monro
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
Hush, I stole them out of the moon.
Give me your beads, I want them.
No.
I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.
This bra is a remembrance made from memories and the ashes of the past.
This Bizarre Bra relates to a recent combine painting of mine called 'Infinity Runs Off', depicting the Christlike 'divine child' and the breastlike 'orb of eternity'. I altered a plain bra and added to while it was on my body. Reminscent of a keepsake, it is a work of art about life-giving breasts, our memories of our mothers and the deep importance of a child to its mother. It pays homage to breasts, mothers and babies, honoring our loss of them and raking through the ashes of love and memory to sanctify what remains.
'Rain Spell', painted in acrylic and oil, with beads and trim sewn on, has an obsessive, overworked air: everything is hot and dry and you can imagine the puddles and drops but all you can do is wait; you try to distract yourself by fiddling with something small, anxiously pulling it to pieces and rearranging it, wishing it would somehow make the rain come sooner. There is a lot of bright red in it to conjure the feeling of heat and restless emotion, but there are also many other bright colours to show that this is an African storm and will be sudden and splendid.
This piece started as a print of Raoul Dufy's 'Interior with an Open Window', which I found at a charity shop. The print must have been exposed to sunlight for a long time as all the colour seemed to be drained from it, leaving only light blue. You can still see the original colour of the ink where the mounting covered and protected the edge. As in 'Rain Spell' I have obsessed over it, adjusting it, hoping to draw blue water from a sun-bleached scene. The two photographs I took in Gaborone when I lived there five years ago during a drought even bleaker than the one in Cape Town. There was very little shelter from the sun there and I'd start burning straight away when I went outside. The tap casting this shadow was in the courtyard where I hung our washing, which I could sometimes start taking down again as soon as I'd finished pegging it up.
I found the title'The Flower Garden of the Old Woman who Cast Spells' after I'd made the work, when I was reading The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson and came to the part of the story where Gerda remembers her lost playmate, Kai, because she realizes that the garden she is playing in has no roses in it; when she cries, the roses that the possessive Old Woman made disappear so that Gerda would forget about Kai are wet by her tears and grow back up from the dark earth to comfort her. They tell her that Kai cannot be dead and gone because they did not see him below the ground, where all the dead are. This painting is about memory and reminders. To me it has an iconic quality, cherishing and protecting but also transforming and personalizing the past. I used an old found photograph of an elderly couple seated in their garden, with their dog and cat, and covered it with pressed flowers from my garden, roses from an old chocolate box, oil paint, beads and silk thread. Across the top are the notes from the photographer who took the photo, written on the back, indicating to the person who was going to tint the black and white photograph what colours he or she should use. They read like a poem to me. I copied them out as they were written: some are in shorthand but when read aloud they are: “Lady Hair Iron Grey, Eyes Grey Green, Dress Blue and White, Pearl Beads, Gent Suit Grey Pin Stripes Flanel, Tie Grey and Red with Blue, Flower Red Rose, Hair White, Eyes Blue, Dog White, Black Nose, Cat Smoky Grey feet beige only with stripes like a Tiger!”
'Grief Garden' is about the death of a loved one and how it feels to be left behind, wishing you could disappear too but at the same time clinging to life and finding comfort in just 'being'. It is about sweet, bright beauty that dies and becomes the dark pit of decay essential for new life. In my grief, all the broken, breaking-down, so-called ugly things were real to me, so I stuck them on to give them more 'weight' and presence, even though they are nondescript while the flowers and figure are so clear. At the time, it felt as if I was safe only on this tiny square of warm, mowed grass, surrounded by a wall of garden flowers that protected me from seeing the wild wastes and sweeping plains of perpetual life and death.
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How to Disappear
By Amanda Dalton
First rehearse the easy things.
Lose your words in a high wind,
walk in the dark on an unlit road,
observe how other people mislay keys,
their diaries, new umbrellas.
See what it takes to go unnoticed
in a crowded room. Tell lies:
I love you. I'll be back in half an hour.
I'm fine.
Then childish things.
Stand very still behind a tree,
become a cowboy, say you've died,
climb into wardrobes, breathe on a mirror
until there's no one there, and practise magic,
tricks with smoke and fire –
a flick of the wrist and the victim's lost
his watch, his wife, his ten pound note. Perfect it.
Hold your breath a little longer every time.
The hardest things.
Eat less, much less, and take a vow of silence.
Learn the point of vanishing, the moment
embers turn to ash, the sun falls down,
the sudden white-out comes.
And when it comes again – it will –
just walk at it, walk into it, and walk,
until you know that you're no longer
anywhere.
Using embroidery-thread stored in a compartmentalized plastic storage container and arranged in varying numbered hues, which I bought from a charity shop, I sewed leaves that I had printed with acrylic and attached to a table-runner (from the same shop). Sewing feels and looks a lot like painting to me, in the way colours and textures can be layered and combined. The mark of the stitch is as expressive as the painted or drawn line, especially when the ‘rules’ of needlework aren’t followed too closely. I enjoy the messy bits and uneven edges, and the way the wrong side of the piece looks like the back of a paper when paint has seeped through it.
During lockdown, I noticed people starting to practice running stitch as a soothing activity. I have found it to be meditative but also strenuous and time-consuming. It seemed simultaneously expressive and obsessive, a seemingly pointless indulgence and a hard lesson in concentration and endurance.
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The stickers are labeled ‘URGENT DRINGEND’ (‘dringend’ means ‘urgent’ in Afrikaans) and stand as a banal but authoritative instruction to act promptly. In an office there is often a competitive and perfectionist atmosphere; the worker has a serious but generally repetitive function and sometimes hears tedious but intimidating phrases like ‘throw money at it’, ‘time is money’ and ‘productivity is key’. Similarly, our society values efficient productivity and underestimates the importance of slow, ongoing, brave and honest ‘inner work’. Messy life is frowned upon, but somehow it will break through and often does with immense fury - like ‘a woman scorned’. While painting I listened to interviews with Jungian analyst Marion Woodman (1928 - 2018) and thought about how we refuse to integrate in ourselves what we regard as opposites (eg. good and bad, light and dark, spirit and matter), denying that we are anything but the half that is all ‘right’. Suppressing and rejecting what we don’t understand in ourselves, we project onto others what we consider’ different’ and ‘not us’ and want to destroy them. Healing means wholeness: integration of all that we are through an acceptance of what it means to be human with all its seeming contradictions.