Shearwater/ Yelkovan

February 27, 2019 - March 22, 2019

Henry George Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

The exhibition :Shearwater/ Yelkovan describes an awareness of  two homes: Istanbul,Turkey where I have lived and worked for twelve years and my birthplace, South Africa. My experience of one home always occurs in counterpoint with the other. These two places as evoked in my memory and my imagination are informed by a constant revisiting and drawing of images along the Bosphorus where I have my studio,

The studio has become a still point and a luminous portal to a city incessant in its flux and change. Istanbul’s ability to embrace chaos requires a fleet footed movement. The built environment is a site of endless fluctuation. The artist of the city is required to find some way to respond to the wider environment; I am interested in the daily epiphanies, the unexpected transformations of the quotidian into something magical or strange. My curiosity sweeps between nature and culture, the shifting fabric and the uglification of the urban environment or the Bosphorus, a stretch of water whose powerful life flow reiterates itself in twists and eddies like the erratic but driven flight of the shearwater.  As a painter I respond to currents of energy playing out in the city and across the water, working across and between surface and depth.

In painting there is always the sense of a balancing act, allowing in the chaos of experience and then working towards a fine pivot of order.
Often the work is left poised on the edge of complete abstraction.

The exhibition seeks to draw the viewer into a playful arena, as the images in their suggestive, poetic nature evoke both abstract sensation or feeling or perhaps an experience of another place.

Painting champions a particular kind of intelligence,
It is a sensual bodily activity like dance, that flaws logic and harnesses the richness of the moment. It reminds us of the bodies in which we live, our connection to each other and to the greater world beyond.