by Nathaniel Stern
I met Bronwyn Lace when we were working on concurrent exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and subsequently opened her beautiful Honors show at Spark Gallery - the text from that opening can be read here. She and I had a li’l discussion about her work over some wine earlier this month (edited by Simon Gush and myself)…
Nathaniel Stern: First I think we should start talking about your work, generally. I know that you are very interested in the relationships between science and art.
Bronwyn Lace: As an artist, I have always felt inadequate in the face of mathematics and science. Intimidated by ‘grand narratives,’ I try to take them on in my role as teacher as well as artist. I’m after a way that presents, furthers and reveals my cognitive and emotional understanding of the physical world. Scientific theories have a huge impact on how we understand things, and I want be able to open up spaces in which viewers can form relationships with those core concepts; my pieces are based on my personal relationship with art and learning.
NS: My experience of your work is as a kind of analogical or physical dialogue with scientific theories and theorists.
BL: I can describe it best by quoting Priya Hemenway in her book Divine Proportion, “In a world that for twenty five hundred years has developed an extraordinary compendium of knowledge based on principles of logic and rational thought, we find ourselves faced by the realization of physicists that experience, not knowledge, is the real key to discovering universal principles.”
I find that I can only describe such concepts by recreating them, by creating my own experiences.
NS: For me, your installations instill a sense of awe. Science is meant to explain, but trying to describe a sunset, the ocean, life - something gets lost in translation.
BL: I get lost in translation - that’s why I empathize so much as a teacher. When people don’t understand something it is not necessarily their own failing, but could be the way the subject matter has been presented. I try to find new ways to help a student’s process, and interpret difficult information. In order to understand and form a relationship with concepts, I need and want students to be able to see them as more than formulae. My teaching and creation processes are the same in this way - I force myself to form a relationship with the subject matter, and everything other than my “brain-based” intellect has up to now played a role in my understanding; the physical is a necessary and often neglected part of understanding.
Repetition, process and intensity are vital to my creation. These tools come from my teaching, but in my work they speak to more than the process of learning. I enjoy the tedium; it‘s like therapy.
NS: Your work is like a physical manifestation of your internalizing of the concepts you have been disallowed. And it feels good to “get it.”
So, what are you working on now?
BL: I’m currently working with concepts revolving around the natural ratio of Phi 1.618…, it’s an irrational number which means it never ends or repeats. It’s famous because of its remarkable properties and has recently become extremely popular, mainly due to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. What appeals to me about Phi is that it’s supposed to be the most aesthetically appealing proportion to the human being. It is a proportion that is found within us - our bodies use it for length of our limbs, seashells and webs and flowers use it - it’s a very powerful thing, a very appealing concept. I want the installations to be very beautiful and moving, but more importantly to raise questions about our relations - physical or otherwise. The installation should envelop them and create a space where they can form their own meanings. As much as my installations are beautiful, their intensities, and the work so obviously involved in their creation, are alienating. I think this is very much part of how we understand science.
NS: It is almost as if you are playing out the clashes between philosophy and science.
BL: I think the plays between chaos and order that are a constant feature of my work are, on one level, a metaphor for this.
NS: Tell me about how this work came about.
BL: In 2003, I made a work called ‘Yellow Pages’ - I began by tearing pages out of the telephone book and folding them into origami. I didn’t know what to do with them; I began sewing them into a canvas; I wasn’t sure why I was doing it but I began to see that I was looking for information that seemed innocent but was actually impregnated with a forced structuring. I wanted to deny direct access to the text by folding the pages into origami pieces. I was presenting the information, but in an inaccessible way - all there, but unreadable. Although I was not working with science at that point, this was the beginning of my interest in the plays between larger narratives full of power, and my own personal sense of diminished agency in relation to them. It was the start of a trajectory of my work that, in a sense, reclaims something for myself.
Yellow Pages, Detail, 2004
NS: In light of this, how much did you consider what material was kept and what was thrown away? A lot must have been hidden from the viewer, or even discarded.
BL: I only really became aware of that question by doing, particularly in the next work, which used an entire encyclopedic dictionary. I started to want to allow certain words, and deny others. As I folded, certain parts were always visible and I started to anticipate and coerce.
Encyclopedic Dictionary, Detail, 2004
NS: It feels like a political gesture away from language. It relates back to the work about science and power?
BL: Yes.
NS: You then moved away from text and paper, and started to use fishing line.
BS: I’m still working with origami, but after that piece I also started producing works with fishing line because I felt that I needed to move on, explore other ideas and media. Fishing line is incredibly seductive. In fact it is a problem, in that I have to continuously prevent myself from being completely seduced by it. It’s amazing in that a single thread can be snapped in your hands, but en mass it gains strength - I started creating strong, potent and beautiful webs. Fishing line helped me express energy in a way far less loaded than text.
200000 and 2, Installation view and detail, 2004
I made my first gut work in 2004, during the world summit in Johannesburg. It was for the Negotiate: Intercession show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and the work was called 20000 and 2. My cousin is an environmental scientist and was talking to me about the summit. His company had produced twenty thousand lapel pins for the delegates, where delegates would sponsor a pin and wear it as a recognition of their personal pollution that resulted from the summit - gases omitted due to their air travel, personal waste produced, etc.
But the pins weren’t sold; not a single one. This dumbfounded me, and I managed to get hold of all twenty-thousand pins through my cousin for my piece.
We tend to assume that the ‘powers that be’ will look after the environment. I wanted to represent the fragility of these structures that we rely on. I made six pillars out of fishing line and the backings of the pins: a kind of architecture of supported strength, but one that still maintained the unique fragility of its parts. In fact, the piece was knocked down on the opening night, a (very annoying) completion of the work.
NS: What is interesting to me is the way in which you engage with power relations in all your work. You are continuously reclaiming your own voice in relation to power, creating a space for others to have a voice on some level.
Can you talk about your work that you are producing for Outlet this March?
BL: For the past few months, I’ve been slowly writing down the individual, never-ending, never-repeating decimal points of Phi onto individual squares of blank paper, and then folding these squares into origami cranes. My intension is to completely cover the gallery walls, ceiling to floor, with tightly packed cranes. I’ve titled the work ‘The Irrational’.
The Irrational , detail, 2005
NS: I know you’ve also got a solo show coming up at the KZNSA Gallery in Durban, as part of the Young Artists Project (Y.A.P.). Tell me about that work.
BL: I wanted to take standard 2D representations of Phi -
NS: Like, graphs?
BL: Ja, we could call them diagrams, illustrations, graphs — and make them experiential. I’ve cut bicycle spokes down in increments corresponding to the ratio of a Phi spiral, and am currently attaching fishing line to the end of each spoke. These fishing line trajectories will extend towards the walls, ceiling and floor of the gallery space, in seemingly random patterns.
Phi spiral
I wanted to take Phi off the page and turn it into a 3D environment that one can walk through, take the order that is Phi and overlay it with the chaos of our experience.
I want to engage with concepts of beauty, want people to feel enveloped by, and acutely aware of, the piece’s [editor: science’s, our own?] fragility - there’s a possibility that it may unwind at any point.
Bronwyn Lace has two solo exhibitions in the coming months:
Outlet Gallery, Pretoria: opens 1st April, closes April 15th
KZNSA, Durban: Opens March 7th, closes March 28th
Next feature is 17 March: Doung Anwar Jahangeer, a Durban-based architect and artist.
Labels: Bronwyn Lace, Nathaniel Stern
A Look Away is a fine arts and design magazine from Pretoria and SAarts Artist, Shane De Lange, is it's art coordinator. It showcases up and coming artists of all types and from all spheres of influence and in the last year and a half has become a great vehicle for contemporary culture.
