Robert Badenhorst Gallery presents Art En’Twine – A Language of Talking Threads

The Robert Badenhorst Gallery will run the exhibition: Art En’Twine – A Language of Talking Threads, which will showcase the work of two local artists, Noreen Beets and Gritt Cammeratt.

Beets is a collage artist and works in oil on very large canvasses. She hosts a weekly art class at Berario Recreational Centre, and consults on the conservation framing of art. Cammeratt works in oil on canvas, and as a ceramicist at her studio in Linden.

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The concept behind this exhibit, which runs from March 28 to April 25, is that, over time, all threads linking us to the past are broken. A few years back, on a trip to California, Beets met an 85-year-old Navaho man who greeted her as an old friend. “We had not met before. It made me think, that, despite time and place, culture and distance, people across the world are all descendants of ancient cultures. Our ancestry intertwines, and overlaps. However, we live in a fast-paced technological world, constantly building on the past, but seldom acknowledging our primal roots.”

One day, while at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, an artifact piqued her interest – a quipu. Quipus are a system of knotted strings that store data and communicate information, used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America.

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Peruvians had no form of written word to record events, so they used a string quipu as a recording device. It consists of a horizontal string from which vertical strings hang. The strings are of different colours, lengths, and made from varying materials, ie Alpaca wool, hemp, or grasses. Into the strings, knots are tied as a record, perhaps of dates, a calendar, births and deaths, the harvest, lunar cycles, population, and, possibly, even names and speeches of visiting dignitaries. Each string, and knot on that string, corelates to a code.

“I have based the concept of our exhibition on this ‘language.’ Today, the language of the ‘talking knot’ remains undeciphered, as all the codes were lost after the destruction of the ancient civilisations of South America 400 years ago,” said Beets. Her artworks are a visual language, in the form of 64 cards, made up of four suits and three keycards. Each artwork forms part of a code, which will be lost as the artworks are separated from the pack, representing how meaning can be lost over time, but the beauty remains.

At the exhibit she is excited to have people see her quipu, with its 1 500 knots, as well as the single pack of 67 cards and four tall collages. Cammeratt’s contribution is a portrait of a woman by a bronze horse, and a desert landscape.

Art En’Twine Exhibition
Where: The Robert Badenhorst Gallery, 68 4th Avenue Linden
When: March 28 (Opening night 18:00) to April 25Cost: Free,

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