| Summary: | Drawing on personal recollections and collective history, The Last Colour
to Fade offers a meditation on the sea as both a physical and psychological
landscape. Memories of my childhood spent on Robben Island are
interwoven with historical facts, with narratives borrowed from literature
and film, and images from art and life. Shifting between first person and
third, between my own reflections and those of others, I have found
in the lives and works of Adriaan Van Zyl, Derek Jarman, Jean Genet,
Virginia Woolf and others a shared affinity for water. The sea – changeable,
inconstant – reveals itself to be evocative of not only promise and peril, but
of sensuality, desire and eroticism. It offers as imperfect parallel the image
of the swimming pool and its attendant changing room, evoking a history
of the queer body in art and writing. The twelve discrete artworks collected
under the title The Last Colour to Fade, are abstracted interpretations of
these themes, where colour and materiality are primary. The works share
a persistent seriality, with the recurring image of a pool, the motif of tiles,
and repetition of form. Most tends towards fragility, towards a suggested
impermanence, made from tissue paper, porcelain, or stained tarlatan
cloth. The accompanying text is one of fragments and vignettes, which
suggest rather than state my thematic concerns, pairing my own voice with
those of others in quoted passages and poems. Both my exhibition and
writing gesture to the liminal space between what is said and what is left
unspoken.
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