‘So, how do you boil an egg?
Easy. Boil it in a pot of water until it’s done the way you like it.
There are other methods too:
1) Prick the shell with a pin to prevent it cracking then drop it into fast-boiling water.
2) Or, start the egg in cold water and gently bring it to the boil.
3) Or, remove the pot from the heat when it starts to boil and time your egg from there.
4) Or… and so on.
Boiling an egg turns out to be a complex project, subject to infinite but particular variables such aspersonal whim and preference. So much is contained within so little. In the egg, complexity isincubated within the simplest of forms – the perfect oval. It’s ambiguous, a paradox – on the one handit is playful and childlike – think Humpty Dumpty, eggy bread, egg and soldiers, eggs sunny-side up and easy over. On the other hand it is a profound and universally rich symbol of the origin of life, the great 0, the mystery that births the cosmos, the world and us. Birth, rebirth, new life, a symbol of hope and of sunshine. The egg also represents the marriage of masculine and feminine opposites. The masculine sun is the yolk, the feminine Milky Way the egg white. Eggs are versatile – they are testicles,
breasts, heads and eyes… We are the Eggmen.
In kitchens the world over, eggs are used as a binding agent, useful for uniting incompatible ingredientsand bonding them. How to boil an egg uses this unifying principle to integrate the range of my creativepursuits: painting and drawing, printmaking, photography and digital art, sculpture, installation, film-making and design. The idea of egg as ‘glue’ has contributed to the process of making many of the works too. A number of people from different creative disciplines have collaborated with me. Thisthree-day exhibition in Joburg is the first in a series of future shows framed as Collective Solo Projects.
It seems that in a world increasingly coming undone we are indeed in need of some glue. On every level from the personal to the global to the spiritual, we are cooking the goose that laid the golden egg.
This project offers a little light then, some light humour, a pinch of playfulness and some ‘glue’ at our shared breakfast table.
After all, laughter, like the egg, is a binding agent.’
ALEXANDRA ROSS (JULY 2016)
PLEASE NOTE
The exhibition is on for 3 days: Thursday 28, Friday 29 and Saturday 30 July.
The artist will be available in the gallery for the duration of the show.
