FINE ART: Ruth Sack
IT was half my life ago that I spent three terrified years as Cecily Sash’s student at Wits University, and the terror by last week had barely abated. How, I asked myself, can the mortally dangerous Miss Sash be making pictures of hedgerows? English country hedgerows? Well, she does them with a kitchen knife. Scratching and furrowing, her marks become charcoal-etched and pastel-roughened, and criss-cross her landscapes like a map of time. (‘The hacking and scratching is just a strategy for not drawing,’ she says.) Her works portray a dark and cold world, with taut and gaunt lines; like ‘Egon Schiele’s hands’, she says. It’s not a world one would associate with Hertfordshire, England. (‘But that’s like living in a wet lettuce,’ says Sash. ‘Who’d want to paint that?’) Her images are intensely felt, their impulse passionate: fascinated by the surrounding orchards (‘chopped and hacked’, to her fury, apparently at the insistence of the EEC) and the ancient hedges, ‘twisted and pleached’ to compel them into fence-forms, she draws them continuously, but at home and out of sight. As the works become smaller and more abstract, they become increasingly intense, and beautiful. Nothing in them recalls the decorative flatness of her pre-English work. Instead, the very best of them become dense with silent feeling. In Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, the surface is lacerated by a fine fretwork of incisions like a glaciated stone: impenetrable like ice, but as translucent as ice too, it is delicate beyond all expectation. As always, in Sash’s work, forms press up against the surface. ‘I hate space — I always did.’ For this reason, England must suit Sash. Though clearly, too, little of it escapes her irony: a thin blue ribbon moves waveringly through most of her landscapes, nearish to the top, or weakly sinking downwards; this, of course, is the English sky. In one work — only one — is a piece of rainbow. But it has collapsed on to the ground. As rainbow it fails: ‘but,’ she grimly mutters, ‘it proves I can be cheerful’. The bleak greyness apart, much of ‘England’ is the dividing and plotting of the whole into parts; things being made to fit. Weakest, for me, were the animals — when they appear. Flat, or spiritless, none have a fraction of the energy which, in her hands, makes taut every thorn, each dead twig … Clearly, Miss Sash understands thorns. But there the terror ends. ‘Was I so bad?’ Was she? Suddenly I can’t remember why. Perhaps if I had not spent so much time quaking and shaking, I would not have missed out on her lovely, tough irony. The Hedgerow Series is at the Karen McKerron Gallery in Johannesburg until February 3, after which it travels to the South African Association of Arts in Cape Town