Under Pressure: Botanical Hauntings
Shadow crops
Etching, monotype, engraving
Written from a farm in the Eastern Cape, my great-grandfather writes to his son about the many crops he is trying to grow on the recalcitrant land. Grapefruit, pumpkins and lucerne are amongst the crops he names, plants that would not have been of much interest to the European botanists who looked for more exotic species to collect and re(name).
By creating copper etchings of these familiar plants in the accepted scientific style along with their Latin, Linnean nomenclature, the local and known is made alien, contrasting with the embodied daily rituals of farming.
Shadow Crop – Grapefruit
Shadow Crop -Pumpkin
Shadow Crop - Lucerne
Reason I
Cyanotype, collage, drawing
From the herbarium sheets gathered from the Albany History Museum in Makhanda, specimens from the Meliaceae family (chosen because their fruit is eaten by bats) threaten to escape the rigid boundaries of their prescribed pages. The bats that circle around Goya’s reader flit amongst the botanical pages, disturbing his sleep and ours.
Christine Dixie
www.christinedixie.com
c.dixie@ru.ac.za
+27766090274
Christine Dixie is a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University. The colonial history that haunts the town of Makhanda where she lives has compelled her preoccupation with Europe’s legacy in Africa. Dixie has a proclivity for printmaking, but her practice often includes incorporating her print works into film or elaborate installations. Recent exhibitions include The Binding Project, Trade-Off and The Abyssal Zone.
