Printmaker’s meditation on trees beautifully roots out the effects of humanity on the environment
It is entirely coincidental that on the day I attended the opening of Sharon Sampson’s Circle of Life, one of the largest icebergs recorded broke off the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Antarctic. But that is not to say the two events weren’t connected.
The trillion-tonne iceberg is roughly the size of greater Johannesburg. Think about that for a minute. It may well start to fragment, as indeed may the enormous ice shelf from which it calved off — and if that happens (as it did with Larsen A and Larsen B), there will be a significant rise in sea levels.
Scientists have been reluctant to attribute this latest Antarctic event directly to climate change, but it is nonetheless part of a disturbing broader phenomenon.
Cycles of global warming and cooling in the last 700 years are a source of comfort to climate change denialists, but anyone who doesn’t have his or her head in the sand can see that humans are making things much, much worse than they would otherwise be.
Living in the Anthropocene age demands that each of us is conscious of the connection between our individual actions and what might be called “the ebb and flow in nature”.
Bevan de Wet used this phrase in his introductory remarks on Sampson’s exhibition, the title of which alludes to beginnings and endings. Yet, if Circle of Life has reassuring associations, it also encompasses the destruction that comes prior to renewal; and it contains an implicit warning that destruction can also be followed by extinction — the circle/cycle may be permanently disrupted.
Sampson is first and foremost a printmaker. She has mentored many artists in the mysteries and labours of printing techniques at her studio and she organised the inaugural South African Fine Art Print Fair in 2015 (the second instalment will take place in October 2017).
So, it is fitting that De Wet’s comments on this solo show should link the ecocritical impulse behind her work – it “calls for us to respect and replenish” our natural resources — to the iterations entailed in printing: “carefully and considerately repeating a process”, inking and wiping a plate by hand, running it through the press, and by following this “quietly magical” method obtaining “variations in every print and cycle”.
In this body of work, Sampson’s focus is on trees, and in particular an old oak towering above the house she used to live in and which was felled by the new occupants. Circle of Life is, in some ways, a tribute to this tree; an act of mourning and celebration, and a reflection on what it means to cherish or to cut down a tree.
Oak trees don’t exactly “belong” in SA, politically or ecologically — historically, they are associated with colonialism, with homesteads and city spaces designed for the benefit of white people only. But the oak’s archetypal aesthetic has become rooted in this country. As alien species go, the oak is actually a pretty useful import.
It’s not as thirsty as other exotics and, therefore, not as depleting of groundwater. Trees such as the oak can benefit the water system by “filtering” grey water that otherwise could taint the river network.
Mourning the loss of an oak tree, then, is not narcissistic. This exhibition is, however, a personal meditation on the life (and death) of trees. While arboreal elements are clearly discernible — branches, leaves, the cross-section of a trunk — a number of the works shift into abstraction. The colours are not limited and range from ethereal blue to bright orange.
De Wet observed that if art is about “problem-solving”, then printmaking “is actually about creating new problems, and … having to solve them again”.
Sampson is responding to the global problem of environmental degradation. In her prints, the “new problems” she creates are resolved in complex and beautiful ways.