THROUGH DEVOTION TO CONSISTENT EXCELLENCE, LIZAMORE & ASSOCIATES ARE EXPLORING TRANSFORMATIVE POSSIBILITIES THROUGH CONTEMPORARY ART.
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ON SHOW AT THE FIRESTATION
solo Exhibition
HEED
A review of the exhibition.
Heed | Here
An exhibition by Elizabeth Gunter, Curated by Teresa Lizamore
“Heed as in to be cautious, maybe even to be weary. Here referring to a place or a position of occupation.
Gunter uses charcoal dust to conjure up the fetus of animals that are on the verge of extinction or are extinct. These are the elephant shrew, the rhinoceros and the spurned bat. All these animals are/were indigenous to the African continent. Embossed at the bottom of her artworks are the names of her pieces each combined to form a poem which can be viewed in the catalogue above.
I think there’s something deeply poetic about the medium charcoal dust encapsulating the impermanence of the animal fetuses Elizabeth portrays. I get the sense that she is drawing them out from thick air.
Gunter’s work speaks to the material and immaterial, both in terms of the materiality of her work and her subject matter. Her fetus-like animals resemble a familiarity that is of our world and can also be deciphered as otherworldly. Gunter tackles her drawings with such care, almost as if to question the symbiotic relationship between human beings and the natural world. She continues this question by assessing the role humans play in the destruction of the natural world. Breaking the symbiotic relationship that has always been there all together.
Curatorially, the artworks give room to each other they read as individual pieces carefully considered to form part of a whole. I get the sense that the exhibition would feel out of balance had the pieces been arranged differently.
Gunter pushes the boundaries of intimacy; we witness her animal species either pre-birth or on the verge of death. In whatever space they occupy their mortality is questioned. We (the viewers) cannot help but bear witness to such deep vulnerability whilst simultaneously being the sources of their extinction. We are not absolved from the role we play in their demise.
My only hope is that these half-birthed animal species render us the same compassion by which they were made. With her charcoal dust, Gunter gently holds two seemingly opposed dualisms in her hands, one of life and one of death both existing on the same spectrum.
What a beautiful exhibition!! I will be thinking about it for a very long time.”
by Dineo Ponde.
