Everard Read CIRCA Gallery
15.10 - 30.10.2024

Storytelling is unavoidable as artworks travel through time. From their fragile beginnings in the studio through their first, tremulous entrance into the public sphere, and uncertain life beyond, words and stories gradually attach to artworks. This, at least, is the optimistic version of things. Mostly, artworks struggle to accrue narratives beyond those imposed by their maker and small circle of supporters. Diana Vives is at this difficult point in her career, and not uniquely so either.

Like so many artists leaving the safe space of a MFA programme, where narrative and storytelling is all, Vives has entered the cut and thrust of an exhibiting life after devoting two years of her life to refining her sculptural practice in a post-graduate programme. Many of the 18 works gathered in her materially diverse, at times mesmerising solo exhibition, The Fire in the Mind, come with neatly packaged narratives burnished during her studies at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Initially, when she enrolled in her MFA, Vives wanted to probe modern myths in the critical tradition of Roland Barthes, who in his own telling negotiated a tightrope act of producing clear-eyed analysis and stylish prose. Writing about cars circa the late 1950s, for example, Barthes likened automobiles to great Gothic cathedrals: “I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.¹Roland Barthes (1957/2009) Mythologies, London: Vintage.” Vives, though, is not interested in Elon Musk and the dumb magic of his Cybertruck.

In her MFA thesis, from which her exhibition also draws its title, Vives explains that it was the elemental myths with which early humans attempted to make sense of the universe that intrigued her. Fire is a defining leitmotif of her exhibition. “Fire is not a thing,” an introductory wall text by Vives clarifies, “nor an element, but a process of transformation.” In a darkened room on the ground floor of Everard Read’s CIRCA Gallery, three charred objects materialised this statement. Each object asserted the transformative potential of fire. 

A Further Shore (2023), a pivotal early work in Vives’s output, comprises the burnt root of a red river gum to which Vives has attached 20 beechwood legs, each differently turned, and each fitted with brass piano castors. Installed off-centre in the gallery space, a former living room, this enigmatic work was flanked by Artemis (2023), a stone-pine beam burnt in a wildfire that Vives positioned vertically on a circular metal base, and World within Worlds (2023), a glass-encased burnt root fragment laid on partly polished Archaean greenstone.

A Further Shore is a curious work, a mix of civility and wild, wound and repair. Its title derives from a line in Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid (19BC). Tactile in its presence, its mystery is amplified – rather than extinguished – by the way Vives elides storytelling and criticism in her many narratives about this work. A root, she explains in a caption note appearing in an exhibition hand-out, is an anchoring device connoting place, identity and connection: “But in this epoch of great population movements or unsettlement, which includes forced political climate migration, roots are also carried within, across continents and generations – be it as stories, traditions, recipes, superstitions.” 

Vives, like so many university-educated artists before her, is here privileging meaning and metaphor over the prosaic stuff of making and matter. Intention trumps raw circumstance. It is not that the artist is averse to detailing the latter. In her MFA thesis Vives tells how, when she chanced on the charred root outside Philippi, a peri-urban area with a long history of food cultivation, its form suggested the torso of a fallen colossus, in particular the Nike of Samothrace, a votive monument to Greek martial accomplishments on display in the Louvre Museum. 

Vives transported the tree root to her studio where, she tells, it exuded a smell of burn that lingered for months. “Inchoate memories of other fires began to surface,” writes Vives in her thesis. These memories included the urban infernos and slash-and-burn visions linked to her sequestered Brazilian childhood in São Paulo, when books and words entered her imagination. The smell also surfaced memories of a hazardous home fire in the 1990s and the smell of summer in Cape Town. More decisively, the aromas of the root comingled with the sensorial overload of the hundreds of burnt astronomy charts that Vives had salvaged from the site of the Jagger Library fire in 2021, which also lived in her studio. 

The great fire of April 2021, which spread from Table Mountain onto the main campus of the University of Cape Town, was a transformative event that decisively lodged the theme of fire in the artist’s mind. The Fire in the Mind included a matter-of-fact photograph memorialising this event. Cassandra’s Chamber (2021) shows the gutted first floor of the Jagger Library. The empty room speaks of fire’s brute power, which, unleashed, is irrevocable.

Vives, who has Greek ancestry, is attracted to the myths of this Mediterranean culture. The title of her photo invokes Cassandra, daughter of Priam, whose gift of prophecy was also a curse; she is fated never to be believed. The photo operates as an augury. But of what? If fire is a foundational process, preventable but also, ultimately, inescapable, even necessary, what prophesy does evidence of a past fire hold? This photograph doesn’t answer my question.

Wood carries the scar of fire, but it is not the only material that is shaped by fire in the exhibition. Vives’s exhibition included numerous works transformed by fire, among them Breath (2023), fire-blown glass draped across Carrara marble; On Conservation of Matter (2023), a ladder made of pin oak with anthracite attached to its brass rungs; Source (2023), a work including 23 bronze bees; and the autobiographical work The Dream of Mnemosyne (2023), an oak shelf housing porcelain tablets. Fire is both metaphor and fact in these and other works. 

The visually attractive work Sibyl (2023) comprised a dolerite rock placed on the carved base of a river red gum. The ancient stone is the product of a molten intrusion some 183 million years ago. Two oblique holes drilled into its black core allow users to touch fingers; alternatively, peered into, each hole reveals a gossamer light. The work invokes the tradition of aniconic stones, objects without figural reference common to several ancient eastern Mediterranean cultures, as well as Bactrian stone weights from ancient Iran, which feature diagonally-drilled suspension holes.

The Dream of Mnemosyne is another key work in Vives’s early output. Installed in a light-filled room, directly opposite A Further Shore, this work invokes the memory of the artist’s grandmother, quite literally: the volume and height of the pin oak cabinet match the proportions of Vives’s ancestor. The cabinet houses 280 porcelain tablets across six rows. The top four contain 250 numbered tablets featuring impressions of the trunk of the tree that became the cabinet, and on the reverse, impressions of the artist’s hand. Thirty larger panels in the lower two rows record the tree’s most dramatic displays of gashes and knots. Austere yet intimate, the work is topped with a rounded glass vessel blown by the artist previously filled with black ink containing residue of the burnt books collected from the Jagger Library, mixed with seawater and gum Arabic. A viewer spilt this ink onto the sculpture when it appeared in her degree exhibition at the Michaelis Galleries in 2023.

The influence of Martin Puryear and Louise Bourgeois is palpable in Vives’s sculptures, at least formally, but the line that connects these artists is, at best, crooked, not straight. Writing about Puryear in 1991, curator Robert Storr noted, how, among the major sculptors active at the time, Puryear was “exceptional in the extremes to which he goes to remove personal narrative from the aura of his pieces²Robert Storr (1991) ‘Martin Puryear: The Hand’s Proportion’, in Martin Puryear, Chicago, New York: Art Institute of Chicago/ Thames & Hudson.”. Vives is still negotiating how much to give of herself, and not. Writing more recently about the fabric sculptures that Bourgeois made in the last 15 years of her life, objects charged with biography and sublimated psychological moods, curator Ralph Rugoff remarked that they engage “the viewer in an experience of slipping from one (often unrelated) association to another in an unresolvable process of interpretation³Ralph Rugoff (2022) ‘Mechanisms of Ambiguity and Sensation: The Late Fabric Sculptures of Louise Bourgeois’, in Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, London/ Berlin: Hayward Gallery Publishing / Hatje Cantz.”. The same is broadly true of the things Vives makes; they invite wonderment and speculation.

In this era of doctoral-level degrees in artistic practice, withered arts media and able-fingered Instagram users, the question of whose story has the ability to fire the unresolvable process of interpretation Rugoff wrote about has become increasingly confused and urgent. Does the story vest with the object’s maker, or with a professional interpreter, be it dealer, critic, curator or art historian, or does it vest in the thing’s ultimate custodian, be it museum or private individual? Perhaps it is a chorus of all of these voices. But what of the emoji-enabled viewer, whose likes and shares are ensnared in a ubiquitous and ephemeral attention economy? I don’t know anymore.

In her MFA thesis, Vives, thinking about the role of migration and storytelling, writes: “It has been said that after the first generation leaves and the second generation builds, the third revives the inheritance of the past. I am that third generation – the keeper of many ill-fitting fragments of family stories, pieced together in the imagination … materialised through my works.” For now, I’m willing to listen to these stories: they are sincere and informative, making legible Vives’s strange objects formed by fire.