FINE ART: Julia Teale
ONE is immediately struck by the quiet ”presentness” of Steven Inggs’s recent works on paper. The rather worn appearance of the gallery – its large, rectangular, black-slate floor and somewhat shabby box- board walls – is suffused with a contemplative mood, not unlike what one might experience in a sunlit cemetery or a monument.
This effect is in part achieved by the uncluttered minimalism of the ensemble – all 33 of the works are set in simple, black wooden frames, the 20 odd ”light- sensitive drawings” delicately suspended between glass and mount. The work has an overall bleached appearance, the subdued colour of nine lithographic prints the only break in an otherwise dense monochromy.
Inggs’s subject matter is made up of odds and ends that may seem of little consequence in a world where the new, the bizarre and the hi-tech scramble for their slice of a rapidly dwindling collective attention span. Small bits of broken pottery, rusting kitchen implements and garden tools weave their way through his finely wrought images.
He takes these objects and subjects them to a painstaking process of transformation, magnification and isolation. The scrupulous registration of accreted rust and cracks, pores and wrinkles, has the curious effect of suggesting both proximity and distance, bringing into focus the sense in which these objects are repositories of feeling and experience while simultaneously asserting their uncompromising otherness.
Much could be said here about memory and history, about the retrieval of the layers of events that make up our colonial heritage – Inggs is passionately involved with Stanford’s particular history, its divisions of labour and divisions of wealth – and all of this is alluded to in his work. But what makes this visual microhistory so much more than yet another interrogation of our calamitous past and amnesiac present, is the artist’s pictorial acumen, his ability to turn refuse into relic through the thoughtful and restrained deployment of what one gradually realises is a formidable armoury of graphic technique.
One would like to think that this combination of craftsmanship and conceptual rigour might stand as inspiration to a new generation of print-makers concerned with extending the possibilities of the medium.
The exhibition is on show at the Association of Visual Arts, Cape Town, until May 31