Stoicism and Vulnerability – Art as Praise-song
Ingrid Bolton and Emma Willemse
Ashraf Jamal
Ingrid Bolton and Emma Willemse are a compelling duo. Their exhibition – Realign – while uniquely expressive, speaks jointly to needs-wants-dreads we are experiencing at this precipitous global moment, for doubtless ours is a point, place, and time of extinction. Overly dramatic the denialists would say, but what Bolton and Willemse are asking us to consider in-and-through their acutely tender art, is how we can save ourselves. It is art’s restorative power that is embraced, art’s affective and nonjudgemental ability to help us realign our perspectives, values, feelings. There are parallels for this exhibition. Willemse notes Archie Moore’s showing at the Australian Pavillion, Kith and Kin, which explores the ties that bind as well as those that have sought to destroy human connection – namely, colonialism. Throughout history there have been threats to a global humanity – extractive capital has proved the most virulent, most on-going. But it is against this life-negating drive that the artists position themselves and their art. Their vision of art is bodily and morally concerned with the precarity of our relationship with the world – the sacred interconnectedness of all life forces. Hence their emphasis on the ‘kincentric’, as opposed to the egocentric, which places humankind at the apex of an exclusionary and hierarchical chain of being. This, too, is the driving concern of the Joburg Contemporary Aart Foundation’s year-long show, ‘Ecospheres’. Therein, as in the work of Bolton and Willemse, the critical goad resides in the question – What is this Anthropos? What is humankind, what am I?
Emma Willemse – Elegy for a deceased tree ii – 2023 – Monotype and cotton on Fabriano – 71 x 71 cm
Emma Willemse – Portrait of a deceased tree ii (detail) – 2024 – Monotype and cotton on Fabriano – 71 x 71cm
Kincentric is a cognate of the ‘Symbiocene’, coined by Glen Albrecht, which advocates ‘living together for mutual benefit’. A mutually enriching codependent economy, it nevertheless remains an anticipatory politics – wholly cognizant of the clear and present threat of uncontrollable degrees of carbon dioxide, plastic and air pollution, food waste, deforestation, oceanic acidification, water scarcity, over fishing, and many other atrocities. The list is endless – fatality the norm. As Bolton pithily phrases it, we are now ‘stoic and vulnerable’. This mental climate, it seems, is the only viable response, given the acuity of our vulnerability. Here, furthermore, it is vital to note that the vulnerability of which Bolton speaks applies to the entire natural world – in her art, to the fever tree in particular. As T.J. Demos notes, ‘we are seeing a flourishing of contemporary artistic practices that address and negotiate environmental conflicts in other ways. These include cogent analyses of ecological destruction … as well as creative alternatives that model forms of environment sustainability and egalitarian structures of living’. Here, kincentricity is key. Artists, at best, perform the conditions for change or the conditions that afflict us. Willemse’s ‘commemorative “portraits”’ of a deceased tree stump are one such case, as are Bolton’s ‘marks’ made with charcoal – ‘the process of extracting coal dust and transforming it into ink’ – through which the artist ‘pay[s] homage to the formidable fever tree forest that stand resilient, formed through flooding and the chance alignment of timing, seed and availability and water’. These projects are processual. They foreground the precarity of life, as well as its ‘resilience’. For what matters is how, through art, we can viscerally and ethically understand ourselves and our place in the world.
Ingrid Bolton-Forest III, monotype 30x30cm
Ingrid Bolton -Burden, stitched coal soaked linen, copper, size variable
Ingrid Bolton- Fever Trees I, charcoal 20 x 77cm
Bolton and Willemse’s singular-yet-joint stance – an expressive advocacy – not only speaks to a heightened sense of connectivity, it enables them to see and understand art’s purpose as a praise-song. Water, plant and animal life, are, at once, autochthonous, mythic, and ideational – it is impossible to separate materiality from the moral realm or dream world. The unconscious and conscious are indissoluble. When Bolton constructs the following sequence – printmaking … drawing … the integrality of copper cable and porcelain – we immediately understand that it is through starkly contrasting materials and practices that a new formation, both embodied and conceptual, emerges. This is also evident in Willemse’s Elegy for a deceased tree. Drawn from a fire, strung mid-air, the tree stump authors novel ‘portraits’, through monotype printmaking. The record is as organic as its source, despite the mechanical nature of its means of production. Consecration is key – ‘By adding cotton stitching into the paper, as a way of traversing the topographic structure and mapping the surface of the stump, I attempt to reconnect with and honour the memories of the deceased tree’. Here, John Fowles’s wager – ‘It is far less nature itself that is yet in danger than our attitude to it’ – is one which Willemse foregrounds. The damage is cultural – it is the impoverished manner in which we see the natural world, our rapidly diminished relationship to it, that is catastrophic. Which is why kincentricity is vital. In conjunction with her airborne canoe – a gutted stump – Willemse has added a work titled The Wake – a paper pulp drawing of the stump on scrim fabric. The weighty-yet-ephemeral installation underscores an abiding cultural-psychological-aesthetic-material precarity. Here, Willemse further echoes Bolton’s dance of stoicism and vulnerability, for it is this combination of states which, barely, remains available to us. For doubtless, ours is an endurance exercise, an extreme sport, a life at a radical ecological-socio-economic-ideological tipping point, in which Bolton and Willemse’s driving desire for connection is being denied by a nihilism, a globally operative death instinct.
How does art combat this withering death sentence, this perverse preference for pain and hardship, without reprieve, or the faintest understanding of our core vulnerability? One does so counterintuitively, by holding fast to a profoundly generative empathy. If our prime resource, water, has been monetized, what of the air? It too is now a space, an object, a threat, a myth, a weapon, a common. No Universal Right remains. All that informs and defines life is now contested. Which is why the agronomist and revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, states that ‘to defend the Earth is the most efficient process to defend Humankind’. And why, against fatality, Bolton and Willemse ask how – despite a radical ecological imbalance, the direct result of human mismanagement and resource extraction – we can nevertheless live well? More specifically, how, through the making of art, a counterintuitive life-affirming spirit can thrive. A former microbiologist and a former librarian, Bolton and Willemse understand the criticality of detail, not only because the devil resides therein, but because through a minute understanding of their respective materials and practice, art as a conjuration, and evocation, becomes possible. If stoicism allows for a critical detachment, vulnerability allows for engagement. It is the tension produced through distance and intimacy that the truth and soul of a given work emerges. Through her art, Willemse ‘aim[s] to create a space for considering alternative ways to be in the world, a space of contemplation and a place that creates the potential to re-align our connections with everything that exists in the world around us’. Realignment is key, but so is a somatic and visceral engagement with the artwork. Commentary about the state of the world is insufficient, that state must be profoundly felt and understood through art.
Emma Willemse – The White Paper Boat – 2023 – Suspended installation, found objects and handmade paper – 260 x 50 x 70 cm
After all, the works created by Bolton and Willemse are no mere statements. Willemse’s evocative use of the boat – a vehicle that embodies a crossing along a fathomless watery deep – is physically and psychically apposite. A figure for traversal and displacement – consider the ‘boat people’ then and now, trapped between worlds, one dying, the other powerless to be born, to quote Matthew Arnold – the boat exemplifies human precarity. That Willemse conceives of the boat as a physical and psychological ‘motif’, pertaining to both the conscious and unconscious realm, reveals the degree to which the artist has densified the human condition. In her work, Burden, Bolton similarly evokes the complexity of the human, and the expressive purpose of art therein. Bolton ‘seep[s] … coal dust through fabric in a funnel’, a filtration that ‘mirrors the way natural elements intersect, overlap, and coexist’. Perceived as a ‘stitching’ and a ‘mapping’ of ‘symbols’ on a ‘coal-soaked linen’ surface, it is that art, necessarily, must become a contaminant, that no pure interface or dialogue is possible. This is unsurprising, given the ‘fragility of our ecosystems’. True, we are bound to the land, as for our stewardship thereof?
Morality without practice is insufficient. As to the role of art? It is doubtless beneficent. However, this outcome is only possible if we realign the reason for creation, the condition for the act itself. As Bolton declares, hers and Willemse’s artworks compel us ‘to reflect on the tangled threads of connection that bind us’, connections, once embraced, that allow ‘hope and renewal’ to ‘flourish’. Her artwork, Bolton avers, ‘is not merely an object but a testament to resilience – a reminder that through understanding and collaboration we can nurture the delicate balance between humanity and nature’. This vision requires what Roman Krznaric calls an empathic revolution. It requires a state and practice that is intrinsically therapeutic. For as John Armstrong and Alain de Botton remind us in Art as Therapy, ‘the main point of engaging with art is to help us lead better lives – to access better versions of ourselves’. This is the basis of a kincentric vision, the root of an art that seeks to thrive beyond its mere objectification and fetishization – an art that allows for the wholesome transformation sought under the most grotesque circumstances. This is Bolton and Willemse’s point. To effectively grasp their shared undertaking, we need to realign the way we see the world, and art’s role therein. It is insufficient merely to endorse an optimistic vision. Rather, one must straddle one’s fate and one’s hope. The purpose of art is not to exonerate – there can be no reprieve from the catastrophe we inhabit. However, if art continues to possess a vital role in our fragile cultural-spiritual-sociopolitical economy, it is because it allows for a more enabling vision and experience. Art is a picture of a destination – it indicates where we should go.
Exhibition information
Realign
Ingrid Bolton and Emma Willemse
6 to 27 February 2025
196 Victoria, Woodstock, Cape Town
Contact: 0832977491