Morné Visagie
Lost boys, sleep forever
Oil-based ink on brass
200 x 60 cm

Morné Visagie
In a dear embrace, salt lips touching
Oil-based ink on brass
200 x 60 cm

Cathy Abraham
Ghost net gold on indigo
Gel pen on book linen
180 x 90 cm

Cathy Abraham
Blue scale II
Pen on book linen
180 x 90 cm

Morné Visagie
...pass like the traces of a cloud, I
Pencil on stretched paper
200 x 60 cm

Morné Visagie
...pass like the traces of a cloud, II
Pencil on stretched paper
200 x 60 cm

Cathy Abraham
Untethering green
Oil on dyed linen
198 x 120 cm

Morné Visagie
(Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower)
Pencil on stretched paper
200 x 60 cm (per panel)

Morné Visagie
The Middle Passage I
Carved marble
200 x 60 cm

Cathy Abraham
Tears of green depths II
Oil on Italian cotton canvas
198 x 120 cm

Cathy Abraham
Violet 18
Oil on raw book linen
54 x 44 cm

Morné Visagie
Halcyon days of youth
Drypoint engraving on brass
38 x 24 cm

Cathy Abraham
Counting to life pink on green on green
Oil and pastel on Italian cotton canvas
54 x 44 cm

Morné Visagie
Across the still seabed
Drypoint engraving on brass
64 x 40 cm

Morné Visagie
We lie there
Drypoint engraving on brass
64 x 40 cm

Cathy Abraham
Indigo Eighteen Strokes
Oil on Italian cotton canvas
72 x 45.5 cm

Cathy Abraham
Soul dust 4 & 5
Gold pigment, acrylic and gesso on Italian cotton canvas
180 x 90 cm (each)

Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty

in the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after the night and spring after the winter.  

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965)

Drawing into conversation works by Cathy Abraham and Morné Visagie, A Repeated Refrain traces the material and thematic resonances between their respective practices. The passage from Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder (1965) serves as a touchstone in this engagement, its prose transcribing the real and metaphoric consolations of nature’s cyclical form.

To both artists, repetition offers a methodology of making: Visagie extending the seriality of printmaking to novel mediums, and Abraham pursuing a meditative and mystical repose in counting and repeated action. Both share a preoccupation with metals and minerals; both draw on the sea as image and invocation. In their paired practices, the ocean stands as a symbolic vessel of the unacknowledged, its unseen currents concealed beneath waves. Visagie’s reflections on sensuality and secrecy return to water as a meeting place for implied figures, a medium through which desire and despair travel as light does: slowing and refracting. However changeable the sea, he writes, however inconstant its moods, it “offers as imperfect parallel the image of the swimming pool and its attendant changing room, evoking a history of the queer body in art and literature.” In Abraham’s work, she transcribes with measured precision personal and collective sufferings that continue to cast their shadows, the many ‘ghosts’ of the past still felt in the present. Her scale drawings, however, are perhaps more hopeful than haunting, appearing to the artist as a vision of nature beyond humanity’s stain; “those oceanic depths – the midnight zones – where unstudied life thrives, insensible to our terrestrial presence.”

In this time of ecological precarity, the rhythm of the seasons is no longer assured as it once was. When Carson warned against the environmental devastation precipitated by pesticides in Silent Spring (1962), painting a vision of a future without birdsong, she did not imagine that spring itself might fail in keeping time, might begin to shift in date and character, might be all but eclipsed by unseasonable heat. But the sun continues to abide by its rhythm, the moon still travels in her orbit, and tides draw back and forth across the sands. To Abraham and Visagie, the contemplation of nature’s beauty – its persistence and fragility – is a restorative act, a movement towards individual, historical, and future healing that reaches for those “reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

VIEW EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

CATHY ABRAHAM

MORNÉ VISAGIE