Anthony Harris

Anthony Harris is having his 16th Solo Exhibition at the National Arts Festival 2016.

In the new series of work titled “Deep Time”, Harris conceptually explores land issues: the concept of geological time, social geography, political, culture and cultural identity. Harris uses maps in some works as he says…”Maps codify man’s existence”. These works, at times surreal, are composed of elements that bear witness to change and evolution. Deep Time is the concept of geological time. The modern philosophical concept was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton. Science has since established, after a long and complex history of developments, the age of the Earth at around 4.54 billion years.

The desire to mark and socialise “space”; thereby making them “places” is a universal human urge. Southern Africa is a multiplex mosaic of cultural marks. The earliest evidence of land-scaping is the 2 million years of tradition of stone tools wrought from fine-grained rocks. Then is the 100,000 years of symbolically using and marking earth-ochres. We have still more marks – San rock-art; Black farmers’ stone walled towns, Khoe herders’ trek routes and White settlers telephone poles. All these marks make imprints like contour lines on the land and betoken layers of relationships between inner mind-scapes and outer land-scapes.