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In the first weeks of deep COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Renée Rossouw read, in quick succession, two books about trees: The Overstory by Richard Power and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. She came away with a deep sense of trees as a powerful and interconnected super-species. With this in mind and in the context of the forced isolation of lockdown, she started to pay attention to how the world stood still; how nature thrived and almost rewilded, birds revelling in the calm. Rossouw resolved to go into her studio and produce an ecologically-driven body of work, using only whatever was in her studio at the time. She considered her own ecosystem of the studio, the gaping contrast between humans and trees, what a piece of wood represents, and how detached it can seem from its own history. “When you look at a piece of wood, you disconnect from how there were owls that once lived there, that it grew under rain clouds.” Rossouw wanted to capture something about this unseen natural cycle and the microcosms and stories that once quietly circulated within the materials that we take for granted. Communal Landscape 1 and 2 formed part of the resulting body of work titled Stillness, and Rossouw’s subsequent solo exhibition at WORLDART Gallery in Cape Town in 2020. These two pieces were recreated on top of what Rossouw calls “failed” self-portraits. These shapes that began as a women’s body came to represent a mycelium root network – a fungal colony that is believed to communicate with other mushrooms through underground electrical impulses.
While Stillness was originally composed of repurposed paper and wood, the first of the Communal Landscape works has been stunningly reimagined in both size and medium, recreated as a monumental wool tufted wall piece in collaboration with Zydia Botes from Something Good Studio. This new iteration unfolded after Botes had a studio visit in Cape Town with Rossouw around 6 months ago and saw the original wooden Communal Landscape 1. Curiosity peaked, she had an idea to recreate the curved edges, wall-relief and three dimensionality of the original work, but in the tricky medium of thread. After several disappointing attempts, Botes discovered a KwaZulu-Natal-based factory, who deftly weave custom modules and shapes in tufted wool, a natural fiber, achieving the powerful effect that she had originally visualised. Botes and Rossouw worked together for months on details such as colours, texture, relief and scale. Both in spite of and because of each misstep, the time spent on developing these new elements was worth it – the result was more spectacular than Botes and Rossouw had imagined. This new adaptation is a painstakingly produced and beautiful reconsideration of the piece’s initial reference to the thread-like structures that expand to form a mycelium network, carrying the cryptic messages and stories of little, unknown lives. -
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Exclusive to Candice Berman, launching at 223 Jan Smuts on 2 March 2024.
COMMUNAL LANDSCAPE 1, 8 - 15 March 2024
