Eureka
Dr Thuthula Balfour’s official opening address for the Eureka Exhibition.
Janine Allen

Underneath the carpet of riches (2018-)
Colour pencil on Arches, 75 X 105 cm
Price: R 12 500

The artisan miners (previously known as illegal diamond miners) of Kimberley in the Northern Cape use heavy cloth, for example carpets to cover the diamond-rich soil they sift in the tailing dumps of the city’s huge diamond mining industry. The carpets prevent sifted soil and the miners’ accompanying dreams of an attainable and unimaginable wealth, being blown away in windy and rainy weather. The collection of magical, but threadbare Aladdin-like carpets covering heaps in the Collville area gives the landscape an eerie feeling, because the magical ambience is contrasted with the impoverished reality and historic consequences of the mining industry. This may make a viewer wonder about the metaphor of “the cave” underneath the carpet of riches.

Coincidently the Persian carpet in this image depicts an image of a lion fighting with a deer-like mythical figure called a qilin, which is a pristine motive originating from the 16th century Persian Design Revolution (see the image below from the Safavid period, Persia). The motive foretells of bravery during times of social unjust, while the carpet itself provokes a public nostalgia. Viewers wonder about the measures of bravery of the women who may have weaved the carpet, previously owned the carpet, or even they who must have once, simply walked over the carpet or touched it.

Title: Mine (in Cadmium Red and Caput Mortuum) (2019)
Dimensions: 75 X 100 cm
Medium: Faber Castel Drawing pencils (Shades of Cadmium Red, Orange and Caput Mortuum) on Arches
Price: R 12500

South Africa is currently battling to fathom the extent of state capture, meaning the gradual capturing of state and public assets by private companies or other stakeholders through political influence. In a series of drawings including this one, I am exploring some historic state capture projects, by referencing the Kimberley Hole, one of the deepest open mining pits dug by hand. By drawing in colour and abstracting, I am re-appropriating black and white photographs of the diamond mine. In this work I have drawn with two colour; cadmium (orange, reds and yellows) and caput mortuum (light brown and violet-brown). In studying the history of the original pigments connected to the names of these colours, one realises that the cadmium in original and not in artificial form was extremely toxic, while caput mortuum meant “useless substance”, “dead head” and “the ultimate culmination of decay’. In the similar sense, the English word “caput” which has a different root, but means destroyed, also references ruination. By doing this, I am making a correlation between historic and contemporary capture projects by commenting on how toxic systems and the accompanying human greed negatively effects human life-worlds and environments.

Puppet masters (2018)

Dimensions: 72 X 100 cm
Medium: Faber Castel Drawing pencils (Shades of Red, Orange, Sepia and Caput Mortuum) and pastel on Arches
Price: R 12500

Puppet masters (The hole, Kimberley City) (2019)
Dimensions: 49 X 70 cm
Medium: Stone lithograph on Arches
Series: 2 from 6
Price: R 2 000

Room in the rain
Oil on canvas, 107 x 157, 5 cm

Room in the rain is a painting of an illegal diamond miner’s (now called artisanal miner) mining site on a tailing dump of Petra Mines at Colville, Kimberley, Northern Cape. The painting is an outcome of the Eureka Project, a project where the artist and the societal health medical specialist, Dr. Andre Rose research the social determinations of the mining communities in the Northern Cape. At the Colville suburb, heaps of sifted soil are covered with old and withered carpets, blankets or bedspreads. These coverings not only identify a miners’ site of work, but prevent sifted soil to be blown away by wind or dispersed by water when and if it rains. Artisanal diamond mining techniques are time-consuming and miners work at specific sites for a long period. The limestone is the most observant indication that mining has taken place as the limestone only appears when deeper layers of soil have been excavated. These coverings give the Collville tailing site a magic quality reminiscent of magic carpets, eliciting a wonder about the site itself, to whom these coverings all belong or belonged to, and, or whether any diamonds are hidden underneath in the soil and. if it will eventually be discovered.

Artisanal diamond miners are mostly South Africans citizens that migrated from smaller towns to Kimberley in search of employment and found none. One of the difficult challenges of representing the desperate situation of artisanal miners is that general ethicism may determine that images of miners may only be exhibited if consent is given. Even if consent is given, there is no surety that the artist can predict where, when and in what contexts a work will be exhibited, while the miner may also struggle to anticipate any consequences of such artmaking and the exhibition contexts thereafter. But, how can the story of the miners be told? Thus, the challenge was to depict social determinants in a complex and unforeseen manner. The design elements of the covering and the way it became folded recalled James Elkins’ (1999) argument “that in every picture there is a picture of the body”. Thus, I have explored a BioArt characteristic by visually elucidating bodily and molecular elements to suggest human presence. The pattern on the covering became reminiscent of DNA strands while the cracks in the soil conversed as DNA structure diagrams. DNA’s double helix also demonstrates the base pairing on which the genetic information of all living organisms is restored and copied. Room in the Rain explore contradictions, because just as DNA may be misused in unethical DNA testing, the double helix also reminds us of the metaphor of the thinking body within the body as an original domesticated place or room, which sustains the primordial home or hearth as a gateway to return to. Artisanal miners are subjected to abject poverty and extreme arid conditions, but a miner’s site also becomes a room, a place of dwelling. In spite of the dire situation, there is a humanity amongst miners which counteracts stereotypical perceptions of zamas, and, which opposes the wealth and opulence associated with hyper-capitalism and global mining companies. To give good attribution and respect to the miner and its dwelling, the painting has been painted with oil paint. The Collville site is represented during the advent of a scarce rain-shower in the drought-ridden Northern Cape. Rain itself are used opposingly. In the English phrase. “It never rains, but it pours”, meaning harsh misfortune follows in rapid succession, while rain in San (!khwa) and Sotho-Tswana culture and mythmaking (“man is born from the waterhole”) itself becomes lifegiving. Thus, the painting deals with all these contradictions, fortune-misfortune, wealth-poverty, aridity and plentitude (veriditas). and most of all impoverished ideologies against the upholding of humanity through primordial knowledge systems. Bonding (and disbonding) processes are already determined on molecular level, the Room in the rain is an imaginative prospecting of the overcoming of opposites through the abundance associated with meta-envisioning.

Puppetmasters

The work, Puppetmasters (2018) is a large scale oil on canvas painting. The painting depicts the primitive but complex “rope and pulley” system used in the historic Big Hole, the famous open pit diamond mine in Kimberley City, South Africa. It is claimed to be the deepest hole ever excavated by hand. This primitive technological system was used to transport soil, diamonds and enslaved workers up and down the hole. In the metaphorical sense the ropes comments on the complexity, the anonymity and the extensive level of manipulation in which the “haves” controlled the “have nots”. The ropes suggests unseen masters of puppets manipulating others caught in a historic system, resonates with modern day capitalism and liquidity.