HEAT WAVES

Berman Contemporary, July 2024

Curated by Els van Mourik

Exhibition text by Els van Mourik, Senior Curator at Berman Contemporary:

Since 2017, Chrisél Attewell has developed a practice across painting, sculpture and multimedia installations in which soil, stones, glass and other natural elements are her primary materials. Over time, her paintings turned from delicate colour shades to earth tones, and then into larger- scale installations. Chrisél’s use of primary materials are informed by the landscapes in South Africa, and conveys the notion that nature is not something inert that we access and control at our will from an outside and exceptional position, but that we are earthly beings.

The exhibition HEAT WAVES (2024) features paintings, glass works and photography. In addition, Chrisél created an installation in the gallery space made from mixed soils found after the flooding that occurred during her artist residencies at Bodhi Khaya and the Tankwa Karoo. The mud paint installation suggests the topography of an exposed riverbed or flooded land. It was a captivating experience to see her working with the clay, like she was unlocking the spiritual and creative power of the land. Over time, the moisture and temperature will cause a cracked texture, revealing the underlying structures, which reflect the artist’s thoughts on land use and ownership, as well as the prolonged and violent history of conflict and displacement in South Africa.

Soil can have so many colours – yellow, ochre, orange, grey, light brown, dark brown, black – depending on its chemical compositions. Soil is the matter from which everything emerges and comes back to, the medium of regeneration in the cycle of life and transformation, mediating relationships between water and land. As a viewer, you will find this dimension of the sacred earth, of fragility and of sadness, in Chrisél’s oil paintings. Entering the exhibition space, you have the opportunity to experience the deep relation between us humans and the earth, and how we often lose awareness of that fact. Chrisél’s ecological beliefs, in the interconnectivity, reciprocity and respect between all living things, leads her to create art that calls our attention to connections between people and the environment.

Her engagement with the world, as an artist and a woman, contains certain vital feminine aspects, such as listening, nurturing, harmony, connectivity;, emotion and knowledge acquired from intuition and bodily experiences. The polar opposites of anxiety and courage go hand in hand in her work, and it’s a powerful acknowledgement of her female psyche, which makes her receptive to and intuitive with nature. We can never avoid uncertainty, but with patience and polite curiosity, we can propose shifting encounters with the vital resources of our earth.