Rhodes University Fine Art graduate Beth Armstrong's new body of work, 'To skip the last step', is a direct chronicle of her experience of the loss of a much loved and respected mentor, Mark Hipper.
A prolific and internationally esteemed South African artist, Hipper died of natural causes at his home in Grahamstown last August. As a lecturer at the University, he had a significant place in Armstrong's life throughout her studies and particularly in the last year of her Masters degree in 2009.
Created in the month following Hipper's unexpected death, the exhibition comprises 27 engravings and a collection of sculptures made of jacaranda wood and welded wire. Creating the artworks played an intrinsic role in Armstrong's process of grieving. The jacaranda wood she uses in her sculptures was inherited from Hipper, who used the same medium in his 2003 exhibition 'The Inquisitors.'
Armstrong has chosen to leave the wood unpainted, and has sanded it down to a fine-grained smoothness. She has then joined particular pieces of the wood snugly together, creating the impression of limbs or creatures overlapping, and has fixed her own welded wire work onto the wood in various ways. In some cases the wood is contained within the wire frame, in others it emerges from it and in still others, the wood creatures appear to be impaled upon it.
Armstrong's engravings are a melding of image and text. Line drawings of Hipper's home, stylised and elegant, appear lost within a far larger expanse of white paper. Underneath the images are sentences penned by Armstrong which chronicle her reaction to the loss of someone close to her. According to one reviewer, the words on their own are inadequate to convey the overwhelming emotion of grief; the power of the works is that they leave the onlooker no option but to shift focus. The vastness of the negative space, as created by the white paper, allows for an intense sense of loss to be communicated.
Armstrong herself says of the exhibition: “The title refers on a literal level to the premature nature of Mark Hipper's death. But on a more subtle level it refers to the difficulty of achieving resolution. I imagine always feeling like I've missed something, I've missed some point. That point is the final step, the last step, but I skipped it and I don't know how to go back. I don't know how to take the last step. And maybe there isn't one. I think that's the thing with death - there is no particular way to go about dealing with it.”
'To skip the last step' can be found at the iArt Gallery Wembley in Cape Town. The exhibition runs from 26 January to 23 February 2011.
Photo Source: iArt Gallery website