PRESENCE -- the Exhibition

Friday  8th April. 

It takes well over an hour to drive from Deb’s Magaliesberg home into Johannesburg --a city built on gold.  We point out distant yellow mine-dumps to Nancy and drive through the northern suburbs. It’s a trip down memory lane for me.  We point out the house my grandmother owned, homes of friends, places I’d visited countless times as a child.  These lush Johannesburg suburbs represent one of the largest man-made forests in the world.  So different from the Magaliesberg, in the Cradle of Mankind, where it is still  mainly indigenous bush – rocky hills and yellow grasslands punctuated by scrubby bush and deep river valleys where old stinkwood trees, figs and acacias clump together.

We arrive at the Everard Read gallery.  It is comprised of two buildings across a road from each other.  Deborah’s work pretty much fills both buildings.

 

 A radio interviewer said that he believes Presence is the largest  solo show ever staged in Johannesburg.  Deborah has made most of the works over the past year. It is a staggeringly impressive achievement, and somehow seems even more so when you meet Deborah who is so petite, so unassuming. 

Her exhibition includes bronze sculptures huge and small, large oil paintings, drawings and etchings. The work is exquisitely displayed through many spacious rooms -- pale walls and floors and masses of light. Each room has a different theme, a different feel.

I was expecting to be impressed, but nothing could quite have prepared me for the power and the beauty of her work.  The way each piece speaks to you on some very primal level, deep and universal, while at the same time inviting  an extremely personal relationship to the art.  There is a stillness in her work. A stillness of depth.  She has captured the pure essence of things, something elemental and knowing.  

         I was speechless.  I wanted to immerse myself in each work, contemplate it in silence. 

Become it.

 

Deborah and Bridget in the gallery

The sisters surrounded by family and friends

You wind up a curving ramp into an enormous oval room and there is ...

Deborah's huge bronze Artemis with her three dogs,

Her bow is unstrung.  Her eyes are closed and her left hand

reaches forward with intent and purpose.  The dogs lead her. 

She is moving forward into an unknown future, with clarity and focus.