LINDY SOLOMON

still life   |  Artist's Statement

 

Honouring the Earth, our Great Mother, the womb and tomb of humanity and the sacred source of perpetual renewal

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This body of work emerged from creative immersion in the wild spaces of the Cederberg, the Langeberg and the Groot Winterhoek mountains.

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My creative practice includes regular retreats in the mountains where I enter into deep listening and intuitive responding to the natural world through artistic expression. This paying attention is a form of devotion. I enter the landscape with an open heart and a still mind. I allow myself to be led in an emergent process by whatever calls to me from the land and meaning is revealed slowly over time.

 

“Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called

Here.”

- David Wagoner

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At the very beginning of this journey, a female figure appeared in the charcoal and oxide markmaking of a Cederberg landscape. Her gaze was direct and confronting, her body was of the earth. While she lay in the traditional classical pose of the reclining nudes of the Renaissance, she was no longer the maiden, passive and submissive under the male gaze, but the archetypal Mother in all her power and presence.

 

I found her to be omnipresent in the landscape around me — mountain peaks in pink light were her breasts and nipples, the pools became her watery womb, rocky outcrops were her pelvic caves, the rolling hills and mountain folds were her hips and thighs and the wild flowers her floral queendom. Since the dawn of time, the Earth has instinctively always been perceived as female and earth goddess figurines date back 38 000 years. I was called to revive her form and to honour her in my artmaking process, to reclaim her as part of us and us as part of her.

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I was compelled to create many expressions of Her in various landscapes, exploring the Earth as an embodied sentient being — her sensuality and fecundity, her wildness and her queendom, her abundance and generosity, her gestation and regeneration, her breath, her grief, her ancient murmurings and her prayers. I explored her skin and her textures with imprints from the surface of the earth through rubbings, clay prints and monoprints and then integrated these with collage and mixed media.

 

A year after Her first appearance, I returned to the Cederberg to experiment with creating cyanotypes. The alchemy of this slow-reacting sun sensitive photographic technique brought new magic and led to the creation of a series of vessels, inspired by personal ancestral memories evoked by the traditional blue and white palette. While creating vases, jugs, urns and other vessels, I connected with my maternal lineage — stretching from my own mother to all my foremothers and to the universal maternal legacy.

 

Vessels used in domestic and sacred rituals have been an important part of every culture from ancient times until today and in any rural area one does not have to dig deep to find shards of broken pottery, handheld traces of the living past. The vessel is a universal symbol for the feminine and for remembrance — holding, protecting and preserving life and safeguarding ancestral memories passed down through generations.

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The vessels in this collection have been created from cyanotypes of indigenous wild mountain fynbos and are a metaphor for the protection and preservation of the natural world and a reminder to us to bring sanctity to life. Those which are collaged with broken shards pieced together and those with gold filler in the cracks are a symbol for healing and integration towards wholeness. Creating the vessels was a meditative ritual and I used every piece of cyanotype that I had made, with zero waste.

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Most of the artworks on this exhibition have been created using collage, an artform that emerged historically as a response to crisis and social disruption. I found the act of tearing, cutting, deconstructing and reconfiguring images compelling and healing in these discordant times which have seen the world brought to a standstill and life as we knew it, forever altered.

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The title of this exhibition, still life, holds the polarity of Life and Death as we find ourselves at a tipping point in our relationship with the Earth. We are reminded that despite all the atrocities we have committed against the Earth, there is still Life to care for and to preserve for future generations.

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“It is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning

in this broken world.”

- Mary Oliver

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This body of work explores themes of disintegration and brokenness, protection and preservation, regeneration and revival, life and death. It evokes the question as to how we can reawaken the feminine within us all to ensure that Life can thrive. It is a call for the discontinuation of human supremacy and for us to come into right relationship with the Earth. It is time for us as her children to honour and respect the Earth, our Mother, to appreciate her generosity and to return to a relationship of reciprocity with Her.

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“Our Mother who art the Earth

Hallowed be thy name.”

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