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Enfolding 2020 | Association of Arts Pretoria
The exhibition Enfolding is a visual echo of Gwen Miller's mourning the loss of her husband Stefan. Here she dwells on sites and entities enveloped in memory, both traumatic and comforting, turning remembrances into tangible forms. Her creative process - working with multiple layers of ink or paint washes, rendering some images softly and others more precisely and specific - resembles her memory process.
Featuring drawings, prints and paintings, this exhibition essentially contains two separate themes worked on simultaneously. Each is tied to the central concept of awareness as enfolded in layers. One deals with the twin experiences of melancholy and the sublime caused by reflecting on familiar places and mundane objects - a dam, a rock, a hospital bed. These transcend their ordinariness through association. Imagery from the second, titled Forest for my love, originates from the physical site of a park where Gwen and their family and friends planted trees in memory of their individual closeness with Stefan.
The artworks here reflect on healing rituals and embrace life’s overwhelming ambiguities – the quiet value of care given in hope, the sense of desolation when faced with the reality of mortality, and the meditations on an unimaginable future.
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