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Plant leaf engravings installation view.
the first leaf. Kai Lossgott. 2008. Typewriter on sycamore leaf, spruce and glass light box. 30 x 30 cm. SASOL Art Collection. |
Lossgott’s play between intuitive art making and conceptual development is thorough and intense yet also spontaneous and sensual. When the naming (or poetic caption) of an image becomes another entwined visual construct, the suggestion is that the meaning is postponed: to interpret reveals yet another layer of complexity. In this reading one sees Lossgott’s intellectual processes of analyses and classification. At the same time the mark-making in many of these works is playful, simple sketch-like doodles acknowledging the visual search of the artist through the basic element of line. He denies naming and categorisation as pure or absolute, and acknowledges that like drawing, writing is not a transparent medium. The space of multiple erasures remains. In the same way as the cells of the leaves are pushed aside in his work to make space for a line of newly constructed meaning, the video image of a portrait hesitantly remains before being replaced by the other. Thus the dynamic in the evolving process of remembering and forgetting highlights the moment of becoming.
The exhibition ‘nothing with skin is blind’ uses a lyrical visual language, the relationship between speech, breathing and the endless search for meaning to construct a slice of biography in image and text.
Gwenneth Miller is a lecturer in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology at the University of South Africa
ARTIST STATEMENT
During a long period of illness in which I could not leave the house, I began to intuit how keenly our bodily processes are aligned to the coming and going of the sun, to subtle rhythms which depend entirely on the time of day. I began to see myself as I had previously only regarded plants. I began to wonder about the difference between humans and plants.
The environmental philosophy of Deep Ecology "directs us to develop our own sense of self ... until we realise through deepening ecological sensibilities that each of us forms a union with the natural world, and that protection of the natural world is protection of ourselves." (Alan Drengston "The Deep Ecology Movement", 1995)
We are part of an evolutionary process. To what extent do our bodies recall the stage when we were plants? Could this affect how we perceive the world? We have certain features in common with plants - a form of symmetry, a kind of skin, the branches containing blood or sap, the perception of a diurnal and seasonal progression in the body. The brain, cloven like a leaf itself, is built by the very same structures, veins and capillaries – and who is to say that the one can perceive, and not the other?
Can one approach the fleeting tools of language and memory from the point of view of a plant? A mark captures a moment. Two marks capture a pattern. The same thought, held often enough, creates a new synapse somewhere along the myriad branches of the brain. A plant has this same process of growth built into its genetic programming. It too stores memory, albeit in a slower, trans-generational way.
Speaking of ‘culture’ could refer to both human and biological activities. The visual language in my recent drawings is an attempt to investigate the links between patterns in nature and the language patterns of the human species in both its written and functional aspects. I mark plant leaves with a typewriter, various pinpricks and a dot matrix printer, creating image networks for meditation. These networks function both as incisions and barriers, implying cultivation and its opposite, the very necessary culling through which any culture comes into existence.
sound. Kai Lossgott. 2008. Laser engraving on foxglove leaf, spruce and glass light box. 30 x 30 cm. SASOL Art Collection. |
