Oliewenhuis Museum
26.06 - 17.08.2025

The text below is drawn from an address on the opening of Bronwen Findlay’s exhibition at Oliewenhus Museum.

It is very special to be in Bloemfontein at the Oliewenhuis Museum and to have the honour of saying a few words about Bronwen Findlay’s exhibition ‘One thing leads to another’. 

The show is a survey exhibition spanning 48 years of creative production. Bronwen Findlay is a well-known South African artist, educator, and, one might say, an institution. She is a holder of stories and has had a profound impact on other artists and on many students. Trained in Durban at the Natal Technikon (now Durban University of Technology) and later at what is now the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Bronwen has taught at various schools and universities across the country, and has exhibited regularly all these years. She embodies an ongoing-ness, which is what I find particularly interesting about her practice.

Installation View| Bronwen Findlay, One thing leads to another, 2025

When Bronwen showed me the two guinea fowl paintings that were on their way to this exhibition, one made early on in her career and shown on her first professional exhibition at Aiden Walsh’s gallery in Durban in 1977, and the other still wet and freshly painted, a close golden re-telling of the first one – I was struck by how succinctly two paintings seen side by side can hold the complexity of a lifetime’s work.

In it, we can discern a certain self-reflexivity, a looking backwards, inwards and forwards and a constant painterly re-telling. We can discern the dot which appears here, and in other works, as a representation of beads, stars, and embroidery stitches. We can discern the theme of birdlife (and perhaps by extension, plant life) and, in particular, those ubiquitously part of South African life; the hadeda, the hoopoe, the guinea fowl, among others.

Some will recall the clay guinea fowl pots sold on the side of the road in many parts of South Africa, alongside a vast array of beaded and sculpted animals. Many of these appear repeatedly in Bronwen’s paintings, making themselves recognisable, specifically and individually known to long-time viewers of her work, and to researchers trawling through her vast archive of exhibitions and artworks. 

Bronwen Findlay, Garden flowers, Image courtesy of the artist.

In thinking about Bronwen’s work, I have been re-reading some of the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s writing on creativity. Ingold’s ideas can shed light on how we might think about what Bronwen is doing with these recurring motifs.  Looking at the two guinea fowl paintings displayed side by side, we can see that there is more than a mere repeat performance going on, and something rather closely related to the ongoing-ness of things Ingold alludes to.

He suggests that “art doesn’t seek to replicate finished forms that are already settled as objects in the world. It seeks rather to join with those very forces that bring form into being. It seeks to be attentive to the ways in which materials of all sorts and with variable properties mix and meld with one another in the generation of things.” He elaborates, “to follow the possibilities of materials is to intervene in a world that is continually on the boil”.

Installation View| Bronwen Findlay, One thing leads to another, 2025

But the affinity of Ingold’s thinking with Bronwen’s engagement with the world really had me when he suggested that: “Perhaps you could compare the world, not to a museum or a department store, but to a huge kitchen …In the kitchen, stuff is mixed in various combinations, generating new materials in the process, which in turn become mixed with other ingredients in an endless process of transformation”. “To cook”, he goes on, “containers have to be opened, and their contents poured out. We have to take the lids off things. And faced with the anarchic proclivities of his or her materials, the cook has to struggle to retain some semblance of control over what’s going on … As practitioners, the cook and the painter are bringing together diverse materials and combining or redirecting their flow in the anticipation of what might emerge.”

Bronwen Findlay, Cat, detail. Image Courtesy of the artist.

A perfect example of this is captured in a recent WhatsApp exchange where I asked the artist a question about her source material to which she replied, ‘I do observe carefully at first but then the paint takes over’ – it was words put to what is visibly evident in her paintings which often appear as a battle for dominance between the paint, and the thing she is painting; where the pushing, swirling, directional, gestural aliveness of the paint indeed threatens to take over. 

In a more literal mapping of Ingold’s cooking analogy, anyone who has had the privilege of hanging out in Bronwen’s kitchen will know that not only is it a place where meals are shared and art-class gatherings take place, it is also a strong contender with her studio for the creative centre point of her life. The kitchen is also where the computer and desk space is, it is where jewellery hangs, it is where paintings on the large wall are often in process, and it is also where, at any given point, there is a pot of leaves on the boil in a witch’s brew of eco printing and alchemical transformation. I’m referring to the work of students in her art classes who, taking her lead, are on creative mixing-and-meldings of their own.

This brings me to another point about Bronwen’s practice, maybe even of her personality, which is that she is very deeply a community person, and here I am speaking of her ability and capacity, her impulse even, to observe and embrace other people and their personal stories and creative trajectories. It has made her a gifted and beloved teacher, a gifted and beloved colleague and friend. It has led to exciting creative entanglements with embroidery collectives and mosaic workers, and it has given form to her practice. 

Bronwen Findlay, Time Flies, 2025. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Things in the world that have acquired their own histories are transmutated in the service of one Findlay painting or another: looking around you may find actual dead birds, someone’s hair comb, or a round of sewing pins pressed and meshed into the paint surface, preserved, written into their next lives, sometimes in a circular way, like the tall yellow painting with a whole curtain pressed into the paint which found its perfect home and hung for years in the Johannesburg kitchen of the art collectors Fred Glick and Donna Bryson before its relocation to the USA. 

Installation View| Bronwen Findlay, One thing leads to another, 2025

Transformation is a form of continuity and on-goingness but it also involves loss: I’m thinking of Bronwen pointing out to me how beautiful she found the mould that was slowly taking over an image trapped behind moist glass; I’m thinking of the large taxidermied baboon in her lounge – once living, then freshly preserved, then moth eaten and a bit mangy; I’m thinking of the vulnerability of cut flowers, and of her late mother’s hearing aid plunged into a painting that won Bronwen the Helgaard-Steyn award in 2007—all of these, instances of loss and transformation, continuity, regeneration. I want to end by recounting Bronwen’s comment to me that no matter what has happened in her life, there has always been the painting. And to say that it is a privilege to be steeped in her work, rawly and viscerally, in the midst of all of these processes and images enveloping the joyful and painful flow of love and loss and life. 

NOTES

Ingold, T. (2010) . Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. Realities Working Paper #15, University of Manchester. Available at: https://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/morgan-centre/research/working-papers/ [Accessed 9 July 2025].