HAZEL FRIEDMAN scrutinises the evocative prints of Eunice Geustyn and Alma Eta Vorster
In the age of art-as-illustrated-press- release, it is all too easy to dismiss the arduous processes of print-making as being out of touch with current times. Still relegated to the bottom rung of the art collector’s ladder, prints tend to regarded as less worthy in art currency terms because of their reproduceability.
Certainly, in the work of Eunice Geustyn (above right) and Alma Eta Vorster (above left), there is the danger of becoming too immersed in the manual virtuosity of their work at the expense of meaning. Geustyn is the more sentimental of the two in her depictions of landscape as a “tainted sublime”. Latching on to the 1990s eco- feminist label, she attempts to articulate the current state of chaos and spiritual decline in the environment through surreal imagery set in fantastical landscapes. Archetypal, totemic and sexually suggestive forms – igloos, pyramidal rocks and crater- like ravines – abound. The forms are often placed in opposition to each other, setting up a dialectic between male and female, sacred and profane – and by implication – unsullied innocence and tainted experience.
Geustyn’s pantheistic preoccupations obviously have something to do with those of land artists attempting to address issues of environmental degradation and heighten the spiritual consciousness of a morally disfigured society. But her passionate intentions get lost in the delivery. Her rendition of them is too pristine, too precious.
Consequently, Geustyn’s fictional landscapes remain less indictments of a degraded landscape than pretty fantasyscapes. Conversely, the painstaking, complex processes involved in Vorster’s work, particularly her collographs, operate far less in opposition to her imagery. Her work is located in a kind of of psycho/cyberspace where pre-history and post-history collide. Through quirky titles and absurdist imagery – levitating road signs, screws, cogs, metronomes, bionic beasts and desiccated bones – Vorster depicts a tragi-comic onslaught of information in a world engaged in bulimic rituals of consumption and regurgitation.
In fact Vorster’s work is similar, in its deployment of certain imagery, to the futuristic work of Fernand Leger in the 1930s, whose paintings warned of the dehumanising, alienating effects of progress. Vorster’s techno-toylands seem to show the consequences of that unheeded warning.
The works of Eunice Geustyn and Alma Eta Vorster were at the Thompson Gallery