ALMOST THERE
An exhibition by Mandy Johnston explores the nature of absence and the complexities of borderlines and ownership, writes Oliver Roberts
Mandy Johnston’s art is both earthy and ephemeral
MANDY Johnston was four years old when she drew a portrait of somebody and told her mother that one day she would study art. Now in her late 30s, Johnston has exhibited her complex, conceptual work extensively and this month returns to the Absa Gallery with a solo exhibition that explores the social and spiritual meaning of absence, space and ownership.
The work on exhibition is based around an area of the West Coast, in particular land that was owned by De Beers but which has long since been abandoned and “handed back” to the community, now that it no longer has any mining or commercial value.
“There’s this idea and assumption of a completely empty expanse, but over the years I’ve learnt that it’s definitely not an empty expanse, that there’s so much there but your eye is kind of naive to it,” Johnston says. “You start to pick up the traces of humans and their interaction with the land.”
Traces in this instance include sections of a long-since pulled down De Beers mining fence at Kleinsee. Years of rust on the fence have formed human-like figures or “fetish objects”, representative of the people who were in the space or who passed through it. Johnston remarks that a fence elicits an assumption of ownership, of something of value, a borderline, a threat.
“Some of the figures seemed humorous, as if dancing, while others seemed quiet, like tiny or sad relics from a shipwreck,” Johnston says. “At the time I didn’t realise what they meant; all I knew was that I wanted to collect them, own them, study, order and internalise them.”
The fence figures were also photographed and printed on silver paper, suggesting, so says Johnston, an odd shift from something with no value to something with perceived, commercial value, “something of worth being created from nothing”. Salt is also used in some works. Silver and salt: both commodities at some point responsible for slavery.
Johnston spent hours trawling the abandoned West Coast land for animal bones left by the mine’s guards. She then used a selection to create a life-size bone and wire sculpture of a guard dog whose shadow is eerily imprinted on the wall behind it, making the thing seem alive. Abandoned, dilapidated guard houses are rendered with thin graphite from pencils, delicately glued together, the structures seemingly on the verge of collapse.
Johnston is fascinated, even obsessed, with the question of how much or how little material can hold its weight in space, i.e. the question of the physical/social/psychological weight of absence. What does absence mean? And does absence, in some cases, have more presence than presence? What are these pockets of absence trying to tell us?
In ‘Weighting Room’, Johnston refers to an illegal mining accident that happened in the Northern Cape. Eleven boys had been “employed” to descend a shaft that was only wide enough for nine boys to fit through, so two boys sat in a kind of waiting room until it was their turn to go down. The shaft collapsed, killing the nine boys inside it, and leaving two survivors in this room. In the work, the two survivors are represented by copper wire sculptures that are at once translucent and dense, either taking up fragments of space or dominating it completely.
Johnston uses copper wire in her work because of the medium’s duality as a material used in information technology exchange and an important raw material in Africa. “It’s about exchange and value, but it’s also about the raw, physical conceptual value,” she says.
Copper ore and copper wire are used again in the work ‘Absence can be measured’, in which Johnston has used pinholes to suggest the nature of human fabrication, such as borderlines on a map, and fences — what exactly are these lines and boundaries denoting? Are they really there? Can you really “own” land?
“This exhibition is about the physical, conceptual and metaphorical negotiation of land borders and boundary lines,” Johnston says. “The ideas it poses are not revolutionary, they are, however, current, basic and inherent in the human condition. It is about the governance, value and negotiation of space.
“Everything is a big puzzle and I don’t know why something sparks and gives me goose bumps. Then I’ll go back and read through what I’ve done and it all makes sense.”
‘What exactly are these lines and boundaries denoting? Are they really there?’