a pebble in the mouth.

curated by Maja Marx

with artists: Yonela Makoba, Sivan Zeffertt, Jeanne Hoffman, Dominique Edwards, Bella Knemeyer

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.

– Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’

A pebble in the mouth brings together five artists whose work explores the intersection between object and language – a state when the physical thing ‘mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought’, as Woolf describes it.

Each artist’s practice is, in one way or another, oriented around the idea of the object. And each shares an intense commitment to the act of making – one of focused, careful, meditative practice, where the insubstantial is slowly coaxed into the solid. But this materiality is tenuous: the object is far from static or fixed; it suggests something shape-shifting, in flux, between forming and reforming.

It is in the very act and experience of making, this malleable interaction between artist and object, where meaning is made. It is an act that moves beyond making (or unmaking) objects to making space, making worlds: creating room for an idea, for the artist, for the viewer, to engage and shape and reshape their own meaning.

This interaction describes thus an overlap between subject and object – between thing and maker – the artist’s touch, thought, sense shaping the object, even as it, in turn, shapes and directs the maker. It is a point of transactional entanglement and a space of radical intimacy – and it was this intimacy evident in each artist’s practice that attracted me most when curating this exhibition.

Let us think of a small found pebble, perfectly rounded, rolled and shaped, and how we might imagine it fitting exactly in the mouth. The pebble occupies and determines the shape of the unsaid, it is part body, part word. It defines the interior of the mouth, the silent cavity in which language forms; giving weight to the space of language.  – Maja Marx, 2022

I see paintings as places where language engages with the ineffable. As such, painting is intended as a device for contemplation – what Barthes describes as a ‘stage’ upon which thoughts roam freely, permitting both artist and viewer to enter into a poetic landscape to engage with what words cannot say, to be transformed by the various gestures and encounters at play…

At times, I stay quite close to legible references. These material borrowings animate a to-and-fro between physical objects (and the rationalised, observed, structured meaning they represent) and the poetic objects of the imagination.

In other moments, illegible, preverbal marks and traces speak of the untamed – their peripheral presences pointing to the relational meaning of interdependent dualities of becoming/disintegrating, inside/outside, and room/landscape. – Jeanne Hoffman

At the moment, my chosen medium is mulched paper, chosen for its malleability and lighter footprint. It takes days to dry, which is well-suited to ambling indecision.  

Lately, I’ve been exploring obsolete paper sources and their material flows – a 1970s car manual, a stack of student apology letters, last year’s tide timetable, a year’s cash up of Marvel Bar, the Yellow Pages. How these subjects play out spatially is what interests me, as most return to questions of place – how spaces are made, pulled apart, repaired and metabolised, time and again. – Bella Knemeyer

My recent works come out of my experience of being in the Hogsback area. As I meditate on the deaths that have occurred in this region, I employ the energy of lullabies and consolations, acknowledging the need for mourning, for tears following and for the lullaby to echo and soothe the aching heart…

 On a drive to King Williams Town, my parents were recalling stories about the Bisho Massacre, and with every death or detail my mom remembered, she would exclaim, ‘Uyafihla mhlaba!’ ‘Uyafihla mhlaba’ is a phrase said after one remembers a person who has passed away – speaking to the way that the earth covers/hides all, how we move on and how things look ‘normal’ even though your loved one has passed. My work is a space for remembering. – Yonela Makoba

To me, weaving is like taking a walk through space, through landscape. You can see the horizon of your warp threads going off into the distance, but with each weft shot thrown and woven, more and more of the immediate details are revealed. You walk through the grass and you see a flower, a particular stone, a bird, a bent-over tree. None of these things can be seen without the walking through, without the body in relation to the details. In the same way, my woven pieces reveal themselves as I work. I might think I know what comes next, but oftentimes the reality is very different to my initial expectations.

In hanging these works, they become objects in space, objects of space, revealing more of themselves the deeper you look at them, the closer you get to them, and in moving around them.

The texture of cloth is landscape in miniature, each piece of yarn a step towards an ever-shifting horizon. – Sivan Zeffertt

In my studio is a gathering of sorts; clusters of plaster of Paris sculptures in various stages of realisation. Our relationship with one another is one of time, touch and figuring. The work is slow, and measured. The sculptures grow from the inside out as plaster is layered, one skin over another, and eventually swallowed by the ‘bone’ – the thing in itself – which has a skin of its own.

 The severing of a part on any given piece is inevitable – each severed bit creating the potential for another sculpture to sprout – a ‘mitosis’ that becomes a world-making endeavour of its own accord. One piece connected to another through their various off-cuts, parts and ‘shadows’ – just as we might be connected to one another through our shared experience, knowledge and word of mouth. – Dominique Edwards