Exhibition: Great Expectations
Art can be an act of atonement- a compensation for something already lost. A painter draws connections and ties the invisible threads between things.
For Jacqueline Griffin-Jones these threads are drawn from art history, music, literature and the world around her. Her paintings form a visual cage of references – both private and public– in an attempt to address larger issues and themes of alienation, fragility, change and chaos – concerns which are often universal .
She paints objects that are suspended across the real and abstract canvas to evoke a world turned upside down- a world of opposites and irreconcilable differences. There is an interplay between the genres of still life and landscape, where, like a black hole, they collapse into each other.
Besides an ongoing obsession with the landscape there is a fascination with the symbolic power of objects and things – useless stuff that clutters our lives. There’s also a sense of history here, in the worn carpets and domestic objects and temporality is present- the concern with time present and time past.
Griffin-Jones seems to be examining the bonds to her own history and her own country, her own landscape in an attempt to make sense of it all.
Also on show are expressive studies of the sea and flowers from her garden inspired by a recent move from her home in Makhanda (a little frontier town in the Eastern Cape) to St Francis Bay (a world twice removed from this one).
This is her first exhibition since her last show at the Irma Stern Gallery in 2018. The exhibition runs from Thursday 7th December to 30th January 2024.
FIRST THURSDAYS : 6pm – 8.30pm
MONDAY – FRIDAY : 9.15am – 5.45pm
SATURDAY : 19am – 1pm
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