RESERVOIR
02.12 - 27.01.2024

Jeanne Gaigher’s tactile paintings can best be described as sumptuous, festering landscapes. The artist’s distinct colour palettes are often reminiscent of the stages of a decomposing body. Gaigher typically sets her scenes on cotton canvas and proceeds to punctuate, texturise and obscure the painting’s surface with scrim – a transparent book-binding material. Boisterous naked figures can be found stretched out or striding across her canvases, thick-legged and crouching or, disembodied and contorting. Often partially covered by scrim or disguised in a swirl of mark-making, Gaigher’s bodies nonetheless exude pungent sexuality, which can be unsettling considering the theme of decomposition that so often underlies the artist’s painterly landscapes. 

Having followed her career for the last few years, I was curious to find a reduced material expression in ‘group-psyche‘; refined colour palettes and simplified material and compositional choices reflect a sense of directness, which Gaigher relays as a process of leaning into self-trust. I appreciate how Gaigher can speak to her work in such earnest terms as she invites her viewers to unfurl into this world with her. When I wrote about Gaigher’s paintings near the end of 2021, I was intrigued by her use of yellow, which rendered a visceral association with butyric acid, as can be seen in the work, Spring, featured in her solo exhibition, ‘Sing into my mouth’, with Osart Gallery in Milan. In ‘group-psyche‘, the artist draws from a muted dreamscape palette of mints and muddy greens, sweet potato purples, soft peaches, subtly festering yellows and lighter hues of blue. It is as though Gaigher has moved her focus from the physical body to the subconscious mind or, a group psyche.  

In

mind, middle, sensations

choking with expectation

how could things be otherwise

a world evolving according to it’s own rhythms responsive life

a sequence from the back to the front

(4)

Gaigher depicts a swamp-like terrain of arum lilies. Endemic to the Western Cape, the elegant, long necks of the lilies sway in a breeze, blossoming into fleshy, open mouths that gape into the sky. The composition is quite snug, leaving little room for the skies above. One of the lily heads on the far right pushes itself against the edge, framed by what appears to be a cloud of grey smoke, snaking its way into the ether. The lilies are depicted in muddy green and grey hues, their bulbs gather at the base of the painting, where light blue pools are cradled in the canvas’ rounded edges. The loosely hung canvas is about a meter in size, comprising two layers: a base and an overlay of scrim onto which the lilies are painted. On the base cotton canvas, a headless figure appears to be drawn sitting, facing the left side of the scene, engaged in some kind of playful activity. The scrim overlay is punctuated by small oblong cutouts, which measure the space between the canvas and the scrim, only a faint shadow can be seen through each hole.“The ghostly impression that ends up coming through feels like it happened a long time ago”, remarks Gaigher in an interview with Shona van der Merwe of RESERVOIR.

While Gaigher relates the cutouts to events obscured by the passing of time, I read them more so as events that have been cut out and omitted from a timeline. The artist notes that the lilies are a reference to the natural terrain of the Western Cape, which becomes peppered with the waxy white flowers after heavy rainfall. She remembers that her mother and grandmother used to draw arum lilies in pastels. She also notes that they are sold in bouquets on the roadside, which piques my interest as it is widely known that the picking and selling of arum lilies is an illegal trade. However, those who do engage in the practice might well have little other means to make a living. I wonder where the pastel painters and the lily sellers might sit in relation to one another on my reading of Gaigher’s timeline of omissions. 

The title, ‘group-psyche‘ references a concept introduced in the book, ’The Soul of the White Ant’ (first published in Afrikaans in 1925 and later in English in 1937), a highly detailed account of the lives of termites, written by the historical South African literary figure, Eugene Marais. In it, Marais describes the ‘termitary’ (termite mound) as a multiplicity of termite bodies, which comprise different parts of a body to collectively form one living organism, “the fungus gardens the digestive organs, the queen functioning as the brain”. He describes the termites as sharing a ‘group-psyche’ in the building and maintaining the social, reproductive and spatial order of the termite mound¹Marais was not a biologist by training but a published journalist and an advocate with four years of medical school training. In his later life, after a series of personal tragedies, physical ailments and a growing morphine dependency, he withdrew into the Waterberg mountains. During this ten-year period, Marais lived in a rondawel (hut) and divided his time between studying a troop of baboons he had befriended and, observing the life cycle of a termitary. Both studies resulted in published books, ‘The Soul of the White Ant’, published in Afrikaans while he was alive and ‘The Soul of the Ape’ published posthumously in 1961. . Gaigher admires Marais’ practice of observing with “no preconceived theory to prove” and likens it to her own working process.  

Gaigher adopts Marais’ group psyche in her approach to a series of four works, given the same title as above but numbered (7), (8), (9), (10). The quadriptych depicts a series of identical scenes of disembodied torsos stacked upon one another — each scene depicting a slight variation to the next. I wonder whether she is remarking on the nature of history as a collective exercise or, on the impossibility of a collective history? In (9), the torsos are covered so that one cannot see what they are, (7),(8) and (10) reveal small sections or whole torsos. For the artist, the stacked torsos reference an excavation site, “I think of the top one as being present, kind of basking in the sun, while the other torsos successively going deeper ‘underground’ represents versions before it or even days before it, like a calendar.” 

In addition to his published study on termites, Marais, a renowned Afrikaans poet, also played a significant role in the second Afrikaans language movement, which saw the formalisation of Afrikaans after the Second Boer War in 1902. This period also marks the beginnings of a clear wedge between so-called coloured and white Afrikaans speakers, as a specifically white Afrikaans linguistic identity was to become fundamental to the  ideology of the Apartheid regime²Afrikaans was originally a lingua franca developed in the first 100 years of settlement by the Dutch, used as a means of communication between free burghers, enslaved people, free black people and the Khoi and San. In The Afrikaners: A Concise History (2020), Hermann Giliomee notes, “The first printed book in Afrikaans, from 1856, was a Muslim prayer book in Arabic script” (2020:128). . The question of a group psyche in the context of South Africa is made more complex by myriad accounts of the past. The stacked torsos of Gaigher’s quadriptych thus become more laden when one considers the hidden weight of history as a series of omissions. 

With this new exhibition, Gaigher has started to work with gauze as a more sculptural material expression —thin, translucent veils hang from the ceiling in curved lines, fastened to wrought iron bars, hand-bent to emulate the flow of a river. I am interested in the prospect of Gaigher’s materials extending beyond the canvas and into the bodily space of the viewer. The painterly scene enters real life, engaging the physical bodies that move through it as potential subjects of Gaigher’s world. I am often left in awe of her material prowess, she is an absolute maverick at what she does. However, I do want more from the artist in the way of a clearer positioning and mapping of the niche references in her work, with which she is clearly intimately engaged. Gaigher credits the light gauze material and its curation in the gallery space to the flow of the Orange River, home to the now-endangered sandfish. She notes that the fish have become increasingly scarce due to droughts and the presence of alien fish species that prey on sandfish.

In Gaigher’s published interview with RESERVOIR, the artist makes note of a friend’s grandmother who passed down a sandfish recipe book from an era when the fish were more abundant along the river. I am reminded of Jody Brand’s ‘Paradise Pickles’, a family recipe handed down generationally from her ancestors, some of whom were forcibly removed from Black River after it was declared a ‘whites-only’ area in 1966. A friend of mine once forgot the word for recipe, substituting it with the word memory, which makes me think of the potential for family recipes to serve as archives in a country where the term ‘history’ has become another word for ‘omitted’. I am curious about the historical ambivalence of Gaigher’s references and perhaps I would have liked for her to connect the dots between her historical, familial and ecological markers more. However, whether they serve purely as visual markers for herself, Gaigher provides rich material thematics for meditating on the contradiction of a collective South African group psyche.