![]() ![]() Through the experimentation of clay, I have learned how to use this organic medium, by learning what clays should be mixed and what works well together. “I mostly work with clay, which I dig up from a river close by to my studio during the rainy seasons – this allows for the clay to soften and become finer as the water purifies the clay. By really looking at someone, even if I never see them again, I embrace the possibility of other existences outside of my own and find a way to connect with people.” Since a recent visit to Picasso and Paper at the Royal Academy in London, I have felt a renewed sense of the importance of drawing. Drawing is a way of seeing, a way to connect with the world around me on a deeper level. My process comprises obsessive, labour intensive drawing, cutting and putting pieces back together again. I believe that human connection is healing and important when overcoming trauma. In my artworks every face belongs to another, they are always connecting. Paper is a mode of connection, a way to tell stories through lifespans. My experiments with paper are attempts at maintaining the essence of the pages the different textures along with the weightless fragility while pushing the ways in which paper can be developed, entwined with my own hand and expression. By making my own, or discovering other handmade paper sheets, there is an embrace of the materiality of the page. It includes media such as drawing and an exploration of paper. “My artistic practice revolves around mystery, connection and moments of intimacy. Denny has dedicated proceeds from sales of her limited edition prints to support the valuable community work done by ‘ Fundação Príncipe’. It is based on Denny’s experiences in the former Portuguese slave colony islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (now official biosphere reserves). Robyn Denny’s most recent exhibition, TRACES OF UNTOLD STORIES (Berman Contemporary, 2020) explores tension arcs from colonial trauma to contemporary renewal, with a haunting video installation, video stills, and large ink paintings. From this space, the pieces evolve… tracking an energetic process of embodied becoming through difficult inner landscapes. Images that move me out of my head into my feeling centre. I work with images that have a deep guttural resonance. I am asking how we are implicated in a historical unfolding, and how we might be transforming it. My work attempts to capture these fragments. We are fragmented by it, even as we seek wholeness. Unfolding beauty and cruelty permeates us. And they persist in ways that embody us now, even if we tend to be desensitised. Along with the boons of technology and cross cultural exchange powerful systems of hegemonic domination and economic suppression persist today. The global migration of people in the modern era, often through slavery, irrevocably altered the world and the people inhabiting it. The last 400 years of recent Southern African history with European ships first rounding the Cape of Good Hope initiated a heightened, accelerated time of cross continental reach, colonisation and transformation (much of it profoundly exploitative). “I am interested in the patterns of interaction and behaviour that permeate humanity. This “extending” and “collecting” has grounded me, brought me sanity, and given me purpose over the last year.” Rather than feeling stuck in my home or studio, I feel like I have spent this time connecting several sites around Cape Town through my focus on materials. In some sense, my loom and my body thus lengthen out to these locations. I have focused on harvesting hyacinths in the Black River and Princess Vlei, being outdoors growing flax on my pavement, and bringing these materials from the outside world into my studio. Operating a loom that is bigger than me feels like expanding my body further into space, taking up all the space that I have in my studio rather than being contained and isolated. Continuing to be in lockdown on and off for over a year now has resulted in a rhythm of loom work. My dad and I built a loom in the first two weeks of lockdown in 2020. As the hyacinth in the river grows endlessly, so the hanging and twisting dried hyacinth sculptures expand and hold the space in an installation reminiscent of a hyacinth forest. In its dried, woven, and sculptural state, it retains its presence as a matting alien organism that spreads and constricts. ![]() I am interested in the somewhat grotesque bulging, pulling, squishing, knotting, and rubbery nature of the hyacinth. It can now be found blocking almost every Cape Town waterway, deoxygenating the water and devastating local fauna and flora. The hyacinth is an aggressively invasive aquatic plant originally from the Amazon which was introduced as an exotic pond plant in South Africa in the early 1900s. “In my search for a pliable, abundant medium that can be woven, the hyacinth presents unique opportunities both from an ecological and a material perspective. ![]()
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