"Karoo
Basics"
October
2006
This
is a show about a different vision of the
Karoo
as opposed to the clichéd rustique of sheep and windmills – as poetic
as these images may be. Sally Arnold grew up barefoot on a sheep farm in
the Great Karoo, did her first drawings with a stick in the dust and
found a large, geometrically structured cactus in the yard of the local
farm school to be the most fascinating object on site.
Fine
art schools in
Cape Town
and
Antwerp
, Master’s studies in
Munich
and Frankurt and a long
sojourn in
Rome
,
Italy
carried those dust drawings forward through other cultural strata.
Exhibiting regularly on an international level since 1996 from
studios in
Rome
,
Luxembourg
and
Prince Albert
, her work is conceived in themes and collections appropriate to each
project. An underlying
matrix taps into the ancient links between African and European cultures
and the visual, ornamental and linguistic stimuli deriving from these
encounters.
Drawing
- as a basis for language; pattern - as a basis for coding: the works on
show are not about “figurative” as opposed to “abstract”. Nature
is patterned, as fractal geometry shows. The pattern might end up less,
or more, figurative. Bridget Riley writes about “the space that colour
describes” and thinks of “space as another plastic agent grounded in
colour organization”. The
prismatic blue of a Karoo winter sky or the
apple green background on a Renaissance portrait would be two
related reasons for
Arnold
’s making of art.
With
this her new exhibition in South Africa after a five year break, and in
collaboration with space-to-watch Prince Albert Gallery, Sally Arnold
returns home after a thirty year period spent living in Europe. “Karoo
Basics” celebrates the style and aesthetics of a contemporary, 21st
century
Karoo
, situated outside of transmitted Victorian parameters and nostalgia, in
the infinity of its vast spaces.