Immanence / Transcendence 2020 | Everard Read London

Immanent: of Latin immanēre, from im- (‘in’) + manēre (‘to dwell, remain, stay’).
Transcendence needs no introduction: it is to go beyond, to surpass.

I believe that when we are aware and fully engaged with the experience of being, it is possible to transcend our natural limitations, the constraints of our evolutionary utility design. Through a shift in focus we can become a more profound expression of ourselves. In a way, I view the appreciation of the immanent, both in antiquity and the modern age, as the only way to transcend. This is not theoretical for me, but rather a deep understanding gleaned from the act of living and from personal experience. The only way out, therefore, is in. This does not imply that one is escaping or withdrawing, but rather that ‘transcendence’ implies a dimension deeper in experience right here and now. This, in broad terms, is my reason for the exhibition title.

This new body of work is a visual meditation on two aspects of my specific experience of being. The first grounding element is my partner, Rina Stutzer, and what she represents as elemental female. Through making sculpture of women I have often explored what it is ‘she’ might have, that I do not. What is the magnitude or nature of her otherness that enriches my own life’s journey?

The second is my physical environment, a contrasting landscape with the bright African sun and its absorbing dark shadows. The stone tells of this better than I can, of the beauty within, and of the vast difference in diversity, in density, in transparency and in hardness.

Some twenty years ago, during a visit to New York, I realized that if I wanted to contribute to ‘art’ as an age-old, collective human endeavour, it would be better to speak of what I know and work with what I know – first-hand knowledge expressed in natural materials from my direct environment. The mediums I chose were not necessarily considered to be ‘art materials’ prior to my engagement with them, but they were chosen for their inherent qualities.

By exploring these natural materials in my own way, I can bring them into view as important and beautiful – or simply as relevant. They are often overlooked and unappreciated because they are often the quotidian and sometimes the abundant. Sometimes describing materials as ‘natural’ diminishes their value simply because of our species’ narcissism. These raw materials are an integral part of my appreciation of the immanent; looking at them intensively, holding and handling them, affirms and grounds me.

The work I make is predominantly made to visually inform me. As thoughts run through my mind, circulating around matters I am trying to grasp or better understand, I experiment with making, both in material and method. The result is, at times, purely a way of thinking, and mind turns that into matter. But sometimes it is the material that leads me. It is a collaboration between all the possibilities; what the material might be capable of and what facilities I might bring to the exchange. As I transform the material, it in turn informs and transforms me. This creative flow, I have found, will not succeed if I control the process of making too cognitively. A degree of distance is required – an ego-less, light touch, and enough time allocated for the work to grow into being.

With this body of work, I began by modelling the work in clay, then I let the sculpture dry and crack to go over the bell-curve peak. I allow for the completed clay work to naturally find its disorder, the ‘perfect’ to become ‘imperfect’ and so more real as it moves away from propaganda of order or continuity and acknowledges life’s discontinuity.

The process continues to constructing with plaster or stone, as aspects are taken away, replaced, or shifted. Each sculpture in the series is allowed to find its being, its nuanced otherness and idiosyncratic nature. I am reminded constantly of psychiatrist and writer, Iain McGilchrist’s comment that ‘the point of the universe is to diversify to uniqueness’.

The variety of (South) African natural stone, which is incorporated into my work, is so vast and varying that I deliberately limit my palette to allow for better synergy. Some stone I have selected has evolved over time into its current state, such as malachite, which is a precipitation, a coming together of copper carbonate in a botryoidal mass. (This stone hails from central Africa, and is the only stone used in this body of work that is not South African.)

Other stone has, through process upon process, become what it is: heliotrope or ’bloodstone’ is a cryptocrystalline mixture of quartz, opaque jasper and chalcedony, which is translucent. Once an all-red stone, it has broken and brecciated into a new conglomerate. I think this is analogous to how my sculptures are created – made, broken and remade.

Throughout the process of making the works, I kept an open attitude to possibilities, even up until the final week before shipping to London. As my creative process so often develops, I had sketched ideas that I wanted to attempt. As I finished a bronze or considered the whole of the exhibition, it became clearer to me which elements to alter – or disregard altogether. It kept me enthusiastically engaged; if I remained open to the possibilities, literally anything could happen the next morning in my studio. The process was therefore much more alive than if I created the work and followed normal production protocol – sending the work to be cast elsewhere. Each patina was developed for each individual sculpture, and every aspect is specific to its being.

As far back as I can remember, I have revelled in the act of creating. As I young boy I became obsessed with the endless possibilities of what is out there, in ways of making and the diversity of available materials. During my early childhood we visited the farm where my mother was born and raised in Machadodorp, Mpumalanga province in South Africa. I clearly remember my first encounter with a stone slither, a ‘menhir’ of Belfast Gabbro planted as a fence demarcation. It was elegant and more than a meter taller than I was. It had developed a patina and there was lichen growth with a variety of colours over it, the specks of mica reflecting the light. It was mesmerising, and it shook me.

In an early university show, I made shelves in wood and exhibited beautiful boulders of different sizes. Neither I nor my lecturers knew why I did so, and it was some years before I had gathered the confidence to research the stone I encountered back then and to explore its potential. It has been more than 15 years of active and intense engagement with natural stone that has laid the foundations for my current work and this London exhibition.

Many years ago, I won a national sculpture competition with a work titled ‘Omdat dit nie voorheen moontlik was nie’ (Because it was not possible before). Just as then, this new body of work is only possible now. A deep understanding of stone has taken root within me – and my team. And combined with bronze in this series of new figurative works, I believe the stone found a richer, deeper and more vital expression that transcends its – and my – natural limitations.

I give the last word to Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy continues to shape and stimulate my thinking and therefore my work: ‘Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals, and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions.’[1]

- Angus Taylor

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1972