I Seek Your Softness: Tender Explorations of Paint

 

"Softly, hand near hand, skin near skin, here we are."

 

This exhibition speaks to the intimacy, connection, and vulnerability required in order to experience a transfer of energy - of love, of care, of presence, of body warmth. It is the active energy generated by the very notion of being alive. And it is shared across bodies by their closeness, their company, their vulnerability, their care.

I Seek Your Softness responds to a global moment which leaves us deeply yearning for the spaces and people who offer softness. The exhibition rejects hostility, and it does so gently. It focuses on our reaching for less complex comforts in a time of despair, as we simultaneously question the integrity of ourselves. Our scale. Our power. Where our skin begins and ends. We hunker into hands woven together, ready to hold us.

Four painters converge in this space to consider the scales of tenderness possible and necessary in such a time. Kay-Leigh Fisher, Joëlle Joubert, Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne and Dineo Ponde use painting processes to form material surfaces which seek (and at times, offer) comfort and their work embodies a complimentary curiosity.

Simple but true: painting records the marks made by the painter. As the painter’s body moves, pulls forward, then leans back, a terrain of energy reflects on the surface. The painting archives the rippling, living, interconnection between surfaces and bodies. A resulting body of work: a body and its work. In the soft refusal of winter’s depths, a process of questioning both our external and internal landscapes feels imminent. It is welcomed.

In part, this project takes inspiration from an approach laid out by author Lauren Elkin in her book Art Monsters, who writes “under the sign of the slash” [/]. As Elkin observes, the grammatical symbol rests between two ideas which are not interchangeable, but must remain simultaneously on the page. The simple slanted line is a permeable boundary - a signal of both division and connection. It charts the space lying between bodies: “The slash is the first person tipped over: the first person joining me to the person beside me, or me to you. Across the slash we can find each other” (Elkin, Art Monsters, xiii).

Simona Stone

"In this, we seek softness, and so too we give it."