SHARDS, shipwrecks and skies in indigo inform this exhibition of prints, paintings and porcelain by designer and gallery owner Michael Chandler and atmospheric soundtracks by composer Nick Marcus –Robb that accompany it.
The inspiration for this exhibition came about when Chandler attended this year’s UCT summer school where he first heard the 18th century story of an English girl, Bessie, shipwrecked when an unknown East Indiaman went down in Lambasi Bay, KwaZulu Natal. One of the 2 500 something known shipwrecks which have occurred along the South African coast since the 1500s.
Rescued by the Mpondo, Bessie married Sango, an Mpondo prince and chief of the amaTshomane. This resulted in a tribe called the abeLungu, or, ‘the whites’. Bessie is also the main character in Hazel Crampton’s novel The Sunburnt Queen.
Chandler’s signature approach is to give us a playful, whimsical but nevertheless thought provoking work in a variety of media. Porcelain heads, drawing, prints and paintings are very often an indication of whatever has sparked his current fascination.
The speculative or musing theme of “what if?” regarding Bessie’s new life got under Chandler’s skin. Although it’s not a new approach, it has an intriguing quality. Fifteen years ago Helmut Starcke painted Clio, The Muse of History based on Jan Vermeer’s painting as part of his exhibition. Starcke addressed the “what if” by replacing Vermeer’s Dutch female figure with a Khoi woman from a 1936 photograph taken by Alfred Duggan-Cronin. Regarding the complex interaction of Europe and Africa in relation to Starcke’s exhibition relevant to Chandler’s exhibition, curator Hayden Proud stressed that “there is perhaps no other site in Africa where these have confronted each other more than in South Africa, and specifically at the Cape of Good Hope”.
About eight years later Andrew Putter picked up the musing mantle. First with the aesthetically charged “Hottentots Holland: Flora Capensis”-a collaborative affair of flower still life’s arranged by Christopher Peter and photographed by Tony Meintjies. The work seems to posit the idea of what if the Hottentots made still lifes in the Dutch tradition but using indigenous flowers. A year later Putter produced his sensual African Hospitality series. Another collaboration with photographer Tony Meintjies (also influenced by Alfred Duggan-Cronin) in which Putter imagines the integration of a handful of shipwrecked survivors taken in by local communities. The series also included Bessie.
Our connection with the stars is two-fold. They have the power to stir our imaginations and move us towards the spiritual. But on a practical level they have helped us survive, assisting in early navigation and with the harvesting and planting of crops. Strongly influenced by a childhood spent on the Wild Coast, Chandler’s fascination with the question of how the shipwrecked survivors would have contemplated the night sky so different to their homelands provided the impetus for this exhibition. This led to him wondering about the stories and names given the stars by indigenous people including the Khoi myth as to how the Milky Way came to be and why stars are differently coloured.
Interestingly in January this year the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in Sutherland made a major contribution in the unveiling of ASASSN-15lh considered the most powerful supernova discovered in human history. It’s 570 billion times brighter than the sun and approximately 20 times the entire output of the 100 billion stars that comprise our Milky Way.
The title Look Up, Look In is suggestive of the integrative aspect of existence, where microcosm is reflective of macrocosm or the idea that a part reflects the whole found in Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and sacred geometry systems.
The exhibition opened on First Thursdays with an interactive piece- titled If It’s Any Constellation a large indigo circle painted on the wall on which Chandler had hammered flat brass tipped nails in the pattern of the stars. Using a spool of gold thread, visitors were invited to make their connections and patterns as had the astronomers of old.
There are hand cut-outs (no lasers for Chandler) of indigo ships, sails pierced with star shapes and splashed with silver star dots which sail against the skies full with pregnant moons. One ship, a Junk from a quartet titled Between Tides & Stars depicts the giraffe which it carried as a gift from Africa for a 15th century Chinese emperor.
Two inky works Hunting amaKroza and Table Above, Table Below show the barely visible form of Lions Head complete with the just visible silhouette of miniature umbrella pines and a mechano set crane against an inky dark sky. The constellation of Orion’s Belt or amaKroza stars are mapped out by delicate gold thread. The silhouette of Khoi figures titled Returning Home is taken from an original rock painting and tells the story of how the Milky Way originated. There is a lino cut series of nine moons in various stages of wax and wane titled Phases of Fortune in which Chandler shows the influence of the Khoisan belief that luck was held in the horns of the crescent moon when upwards like a bull horns and lost when inverted.
But for me, the highlight of this exhibition or the piece that has stayed with me is Sky Fragments. Constructed from shards of deep, indigo coloured, torn paper it shows the stars and constellations of the Southern hemisphere in fine white lines and dots. Something about the way Chandler has labelled the stars of Sky Fragments gives the piece a presence suggestive of serious archaeological finds.
The way the shadows gather around the fragments edges provides an unexpected dimensionality and mystery as they appear to rise and float. It would be interesting to see them transformed as the thinnest of porcelain shards.
Take in this fun little show.
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