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Anxiety
Peter Clarke
Artwork 1969
Artwork photograph that shows Peter Clarke’s acrylic painting ‘Anxiety’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, which shows a group of figures arranged on a hilltop.
Artwork: Peter Clarke, Anxiety (1969). Acrylic on board. 51 x 40.5 cm. Private collection.
Artist Peter Clarke Title Anxiety Date 1969 Materials Acrylic on board Dimensions 51 x 40.5 cm Credit Private collection

Anxiety is a study in despair; the brilliant red that dominates the composition saturated, the artist said, with “hot blazing anger and frustration.” In 1967, Simon’s Town was declared a whites-only suburb under the Group Areas Act. For five years, Clarke's community persisted in a state of uncertainty, waiting for the final notice. Painted during this time, Anxiety transcribes – in the artist's words – a “social expression"; the image charged with the emotive intensity of their shared predicament.

The late Peter Clarke’s paintings, prints, and poems offer an intimate window into life under the apartheid regime and the country's imperfect transition to democracy. An artist acutely sensitive to the poetics of the ordinary, Clarke played the role of ‘quiet chronicler’ and found in the domestic, everyday scenes around him a reflection of the historic moment. The many scenes Clarke depicted – both urban and rural – are at once document and symbol, as much images of place as they are of feeling. “I’ve been interested in space for a very long time,” he said of his peopled landscapes, “the spaces that separate people. The spaces that people have to traverse.” Such considerations would become particularly urgent to the artist. Clarke and his community were forcibly removed from their homes in the seaside suburb of Simon's Town to Ocean View in 1972.

A String of Pearls
Lemeeze Davids

A mollusc cannot remove or erase a disturbance, but it can transform it into an iridescent object. Looking at how vulnerabilities can be processed over time, six artworks are strung together as pearls. – October 25, 2024

Path page
A String of Pearls
Lemeeze Davids
A mollusc cannot remove or erase a disturbance, but it can transform it into an iridescent object. Looking at how vulnerabilities can be processed over time, six artworks are strung together as pearls. – October 25, 2024
Path page

The pearl, an irritant held within a soft inner world, is a convalescence.

Protection is the first priority, but out of the process comes a glistening rounded object, a metaphor for something valuable, innocent.

There is a commonly held belief that a grain of sand is the usual catalyst, but a pearl can be created from any organic material or damage to the mollusc's body. The pearl is the antithesis of a lacuna.

The saying, “The world is your oyster,” came from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): “Why then, the world's mine oyster,/Which I with sword will open."

My initial sense was that the saying alluded to ‘a world of possibilities’, so it shocked me that the aphorism was born of the sentiment of ‘you cannot remove a pearl without force.’

Artwork photograph that shows Peter Clarke’s acrylic painting ‘Anxiety’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, which shows a group of figures arranged on a hilltop.

Anxiety – Clarke's “hot blazing anger and frustration” envelope a luminous orb. The planes of brilliant reds and vermillion of the sky are layered, as the folds of any oyster’s mantle; holding the trepidation.

The painting, created in the context of 1967, references the anxiety as the Group Areas Act led to Simon’s Town being declared a whites-only suburb. The anticipation of displacement calcified in the community.

Artwork photograph that shows Ezrom Legae’s bronze sculpture ‘Face’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, sitting on a white surface.

Baroque pearls, so named after the French word meaning 'irregularly shaped', can range from subtle teardrop shapes to totally non-spherical mutations. Ezrom Legae’s Face reminds me of this, rounded in its irregularity, organically geometric.

Seemingly turned over and over in the artist’s hands in its terracotta draft, “one becomes aware that an ordinary physical substance is being transformed into something spiritual and meaningful," EJ de Jager wrote of Legae’s work.

Disturbed by the oppression and the degradation of his people under apartheid and post-apartheid, Legae noted of the intentions of his practice, “People can change, but masters cannot. Change doesn’t happen overnight.”

A mollusc can process a vulnerability in four months, but more often, it can take many years. Revisiting the intrusion again and again, coating it once more to soften the disturbance.

For ninety-two days, Sophie Calle records the anticipation of meeting a lover, only to be met with heartbreak when he doesn’t show up. Exquisite Pain documents the pearl of her grief, transforming each time she re-tells the story. Of her process, Calle considers the final product: “I live the happy moments, the sad ones, I exploit for artistic reasons, to turn them into a piece."

Once believed to be the tears of Eve or Aphrodite, pearls are created out of tremendous discomfort which is sublimated into something iridescent, of high value.

Installation photograph that shows a book from Sophie Calle’s installation ‘Exquisite Pain’ resting on a forward slanting wall-mounted shelf.

A pearl’s iridescence is created by the overlapping of consecutive layers of nacre (calcium carbonate), which refracts light that falls on its surface.

These numerous bands, which wrap around the vulnerability, interfere with different wavelengths of light from different angles, creating luster.

Jo Ractliffe’s photographic print ‘Love’s Body’ depicts the face of a deceased dog protruding from a blanket in a partially uncovered dirt grave.

I didn’t have that kind of moment, of parting... I suppose when you lose something or someone very special. He was so present in various parts of my life over the last ten years, spatially – the way that I moved in the house, in the garden, so much in my life was governed by his great big body.
– Jo Ractliffe

An excerpt from a conversation with Jo Ractliffe, Josh Ginsburg, and Francisco Berzunza, held in person and online in preparation for You to Me, Me to You, 1 June 2023.

David Goldblatt's monochrome photograph's monochrome photograph '“Lashing” shovels retrieved from underground. Every grain of sand in the yellow tailings dumps that made the Witwatersrand landscape and every grain of gold that made its wealth, came from a rock off a black man’s shovel underground. Central Salvage Yard, Randfontein Estates, Randfontein, 1966' shows a heap of shovels.

The pearl is a demonstration on how time and repetition can transmute pain into beauty, not by erasing the original wound, but by giving it new meaning through successive layers of reflection and refraction.

It is the opposite of a hole, it is the calcification of ruptured space.

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