“ .......we start with the title, Realign, I think it is more a call to action and a call to being, than it is to be about putting things in order, because what it begins to challenge or ask you to think about, is what does it mean to put things in order? What kind of order, what is good order…… what is the kind of re-seeing we want to do?”
Virginia MacKenny
Image Cover Page: Ingrid Bolton and Emma Willemse,Collaborative wall installation (2025). Mixed media.
Realign
An Exhibition By
Ingrid Botlon and Emma Willemse
This exhibition was held at 196 Vicoria in February 2025 The exhibition was opened by Virginia MacKenny
Image Opposite: Emma Willemse, A Mere Breath (2024/5). Paper pulp drawing on scrim fabric. 95x66cm
Ingrid Botlon, Untitled (2025). Coal pieces and copper wire.
Stoicism and Vulnerability - Art as Praise-song
Ashraf Jamal
Ingrid Bolton and Emma Willemse are a compelling duo. Their exhibition – Realign – while uniquely expressive, speaks jointly to needs-wants-dreads we are experiencing at this precipitous global moment, for doubtless ours is a point, place, and time of extinction. Overly dramatic the denialists would say, but what Bolton and Willemse are asking us to consider in-and-through their acutely tender art, is how we can save ourselves. It is art’s restorative power that is embraced, art’s affective and nonjudgemental ability to help us realign our perspectives, values, feelings. There are parallels for this exhibition. Willemse notes Archie Moore’s showing at the Australian Pavillion, Kith and Kin, which explores the ties that bind as well as those that have sought to destroy human connection – namely, colonialism. Throughout history there have been threats to a global humanity – extractive capital has proved the most virulent, most on-going. But it is against this life-negating drive that the artists position themselves and their art. Their vision of art is bodily and morally concerned with the precarity of our relationship with the world – the sacred interconnectedness of all life forces. Hence their emphasis on the ‘kincentric’, as opposed to the egocentric, which places humankind at the apex of an exclusionary and hierarchical chain of being. This, too, is the driving concern of the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s year-long show, Ecospheres. Therein, as in the work of Bolton and Willemse, the critical goad resides in the question – What is this Anthropos? What is humankind, what am I?
Kincentric is a cognate of the ‘Symbiocene’, coined by Glen Albrecht, which advocates ‘living together for mutual benefit’. A mutually enriching codependent economy, it nevertheless remains an anticipatory politics – wholly cognizant of the clear and present threat of uncontrollable degrees of carbon dioxide, plastic and air pollution, food waste, deforestation, oceanic acidification, water scarcity, over fishing, and many other atrocities. The list is endless – fatality the norm. As Bolton pithily phrases it, we are now ‘stoic and vulnerable’. This mental climate, it seems, is the only viable response, given the acuity of our vulnerability. Here, furthermore, it is vital to note that the vulnerability of which Bolton speaks applies to the entire natural world – in her art, to the fever tree in particular. As T.J. Demos notes, ‘we are seeing a flourishing of contemporary artistic practices that address and negotiate environmental conflicts in other ways. These include cogent analyses of ecological destruction … as well as creative alternatives that model forms of environment sustainability and egalitarian structures of living’. Here, kincentricity is key. Artists, at best, perform the conditions for change or the conditions that afflict us. Willemse’s ‘commemorative “portraits”’ of a deceased tree stump are one such case, as are Bolton’s ‘marks’ made with charcoal – ‘the process of extracting coal dust and transforming it into ink’ –through which the artist ‘pay[s] homage to the formidable fever tree forest that stand resilient, formed through flooding and the chance alignment of timing, seed availability and water’. These projects are processual. They foreground the precarity of life, as well as its ‘resilience’. For what matters is how, through art, we can viscerally and ethically understand ourselves and our place in the world.
Bolton and Willemse’s singular-yet-joint stance – an expressive advocacy – not only speaks to a heightened sense of connectivity, it enables them to see and understand art’s purpose as a praise-song. Water, plant and animal life, are, at once, autochthonous, mythic, and ideational – it is impossible to separate materiality from the moral realm or dream world. The unconscious and conscious are indissoluble. When Bolton constructs the following sequence – printmaking … drawing … the integrality of copper cable and porcelain – we immediately understand that it is through starkly contrasting materials and practices that a new formation, both embodied and conceptual, emerges. This is also evident in Willemse’s Elegyforadeceasedtree. Drawn from a fire, strung mid-air, the tree stump authors novel ‘portraits’, through monotype printmaking. The record is as organic as its source, despite the mechanical nature of its means of production. Consecration is key – ‘By adding cotton stitching into the paper, as a way of traversing the topographic structure and mapping the surface of the stump, I attempt to reconnect with and honour the memories of the deceased tree’. Here, John Fowles’s wager – ‘It is far less nature itself that is yet in danger than our attitude to it’ – is one which Willemse foregrounds. The damage is cultural – it is the impoverished manner in which we see the natural world, our rapidly diminished relationship to it, that is catastrophic. Which is why kincentricity is vital. In conjunction with her airborne canoe – a gutted stump – Willemse-has added a work titled The Wake – a paper pulp drawing of the stump on scrim fabric. The weighty-yet-ephemeral installation underscores an abiding cultural-psychological-aesthetic-material precarity. Here,
Ingrid Bolton, Forest (2025). Monotype, Coal dust Ink 30 x 30cm
Ingrid Bolton, Forest II (2025). Monotype, Coal dust Ink 30 x 30cm
Emma Willemse, Elegyfordeceasedtreevi (detail) (2025). Monotype and pastel on mulberry paper. 71x71cm
Emma Willemse, Elegyforadeceasedtreeii (detail) (2024). Monotype and cotton stitching on Fabriano. 71x71cm
Willemse further echoes Bolton’s dance of stoicism and vulnerability, for it is this combination of states which, barely, remains available to us. For doubtless, ours is an endurance exercise, an extreme sport, a life at a radical ecological-socio-economic-ideological tipping point, in which Bolton and Willemse’s driving desire for connection is being denied by a nihilism, a globally operative death instinct.
How does art combat this withering death sentence, this perverse preference for pain and hardship, without reprieve, or the faintest understanding of our core vulnerability? One does so counterintuitively, by holding fast to a profoundly generative empathy. If our prime resource, water, has been monetized, what of the air? It too is now a space, an object, a threat, a myth, a weapon, a common. No Universal Right remains. All that informs and defines life is now contested. Which is why the agronomist and revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, states that ‘to defend the Earth is the most efficient process to defend Humankind’. And why, against fatality, Bolton and Willemse ask how – despite a radical ecological imbalance, the direct result of human mismanagement and resource extraction – we can nevertheless live well? More specifically, how, through the making of art, a counterintuitive life-affirming spirit can thrive. A former microbiologist and a former librarian, Bolton and Willemse understand the criticality of detail, not only because the devil resides therein, but because through a minute understanding of their respective materials and practice, art as a conjuration, and evocation, becomes possible. If stoicism allows for a critical detachment, vulnerability allows for engagement. It is the tension produced through distance and intimacy that the truth and soul of a given work emerges. Through her art, Willemse ‘aim[s] to create a space for considering alternative ways to be in the world, a space of contemplation and a place that creates the potential to realign our connections with everything that exists in the world around us’. Realignment is key, but so is a somatic and visceral engagement with the artwork. Commentary about the state of the world is insufficient, that state must be profoundly felt and understood through art.
After all, the works created by Bolton and Willemse are no mere statements. Willemse’s evocative use of the boat – a vehicle that embodies a crossing along a fathomless watery deep – is physically and psychically apposite. A figure for traversal and displacement – consider the ‘boat people’ then and now, trapped between worlds, one dying, the other powerless to be born, to quote Matthew Arnold – the boat exemplifies human precarity. That Willemse conceives of the boat as a physical and psychological ‘motif’, pertaining to both the conscious and unconscious realm, reveals the degree to which the artist has densified the human condition. In her work, Burden, Bolton similarly evokes the complexity of the human, and the expressive purpose of art therein. Bolton ‘seep[s] … coal dust through fabric in a funnel’, a filtration that ‘mirrors the way natural elements intersect, overlap, and coexist’. Perceived as a ‘stitching’ and a ‘mapping’ of ‘symbols’ on a ‘coal-soaked linen’ surface, it is that art, necessarily, must become a contaminant, that no pure interface or dialogue is possible. This is unsurprising, given the ‘fragility of our ecosystems’. True, we are bound to the land, as for our stewardship thereof?
Morality without practice is insufficient. As to the role of art? It is doubtless beneficent. However, this outcome is only possible if we realign the reason for creation, the condition for the act itself. As Bolton declares, hers and Willemse’s artworks compel us ‘to reflect on the tangled threads of connection that bind us’, connections, once embraced, that allow ‘hope and renewal’ to ‘flourish’. Her artwork, Bolton avers, ‘is not merely an object but a testament to resilience –a reminder that through understanding and collaboration we can nurture the delicate balance between humanity and nature’. This vision requires what Roman Krznaric calls an empathic revolution. It requires a state and practice that is intrinsically therapeutic. For as John Armstrong and Alain de Botton remind us in Art as Therapy, ‘the main point of engaging with art is to help us lead better lives – to access better versions of ourselves’. This is the basis of a kincentric vision, the root of an art that seeks to thrive beyond its mere objectification and fetishization – an art that allows for the wholesome transformation sought under the most grotesque circumstances. This is Bolton and Willemse’s point. To effectively grasp their shared undertaking, we need to realign the way we see the world, and art’s role therein. It is insufficient merely to endorse an optimistic vision. Rather, one must straddle one’s fate and one’s hope. The purpose of art is not to exonerate – there can be no reprieve from the catastrophe we inhabit. However, if art continues to possess a vital role in our fragile cultural-spiritual-sociopolitical economy, it is because it allows for a more enabling vision and experience. Art is a picture of a destination – it indicates where we should go.
Installation view of Realign. Back: Ingrid Bolton, Patternontheundersideof ButterflyWing.(2025). Coal dust ink and Calcium Carbonate.
Front: Emma Willemse, The Wake (2024). Found remnant of dugout canoe, paper pulp drawing on scrim fabric.
Emma Willemse, Remnants of a raft, (2025). Paper pulp, collage and cotton stitching. 66x104cm
Artist statement: Emma
Willemse
The need to change the way that we interact with the world around us has never been so urgent. The climate crisis, as well as ongoing wars, causing massive displacement of people from their homes, prompt us to rethink our existence and how we relate to the world. Artmaking creates a site where the move away from a human centred to a kincentric1 world view can be investigated and imagined and where the connections between human and non-human ecologies can be explored. In Realign, I invite viewers to reflect on the alternative knowledge systems that inform our understanding of kinship. These systems often exist outside mainstream narratives, rooted in ancestral wisdom and collective memory.
As a former librarian, I am interested in how knowledge is acquired and disseminated and am critical of the pre-conceived assumptions underlying dominant knowledge systems. In my art practice I have endeavored to question and disrupt the overriding knowledge systems through bookmaking, printmaking, installations and videos. I have also engaged with those things that cannot be explained or known through the prevailing knowledge, such as the intense experience of grief when a tree is uprooted. As sentient beings and sites of alternative knowledge, the loss of a tree is similar to the loss of an ecological system.
The tree stump that is used as reference in the Elegyforadeceasedtree – series, is a remnant of a found uprooted tree that shows evidence of having gone through a fire. I have used monotype printmaking techniques to create a series of commemorative ‘portraits’ of this tree stump. By adding cotton stitching into the paper, as a way of traversing the topographic structure and mapping the surface of the stump, I attempt to reconnect with and honour the memories of the deceased tree. In the work entitled A mere breath, I have made a paper pulp drawing of the tree stump on scrim fabric. The paper pulp was made with tearing up discarded documents and educational material from a school in Cape Town. As such, A mere breath is allowing the discarded knowledge to live on in an image of a tree stump, realigning the material (paper) with a fragile representation of its source (wood).
The three boat-like installations on exhibition are also derived from trees. They are constructed from fragments of makoros (canoes dug out from the trunks of trees) that were found on a Free State farm, where they were used as decorative plant containers. It was a poignant find if it is considered that its ancestor, the Dufuna Canoe, found in Nigeria and excavated in 1994, was carbon dated as 8000 years old. The Dufuna canoe is concrete evidence of ancient transportation over waterways and seas, evoking a gentler way of life using indigenous knowledge systems.
The dugout canoes in my work serve as powerful symbols of navigation and journey. Once vessels of survival and trade, the decayed fragments of the canoes now embody the stories and histories of the cultures they represent. By repurposing these canoes using a range of paper-making techniques, I seek to highlight the transformative power of materials and the knowledge imbedded in them. In the WhitePaperBoat,2 the makoro is overloaded with A4 size handmade paper sheets, juxtaposing a remnant of an ancient way of living with vestiges of colonialism and bureaucracy. My aim is to suggest the tragedy of a loss of tradition and culture.
The boat-like installations on this exhibition are a continuation of my investigation of the motif of the boat and the meanings it generates in the context of displacement. I am interested in how the boat, as a means of displacement, can be a metaphor for the traumatic experience of loss. Travelling over water, which is a symbol of the unconscious, a boat has connotations of a safe container transporting the psyche over the treacherous waters of the unknown. However, the boats that I am creating in my art practice are all rendered impotent through their brokenness, implying the woundedness of the psyche of the displaced.
Through this exhibition, I aim to create a space for considering alternative ways to be in the world, a space of contemplation and a place that creates the potential to re-align our connections with everything that exist in the world around us.
1. A fundamental idea to many indigenous beliefs, kincentricity is a concept that centers relationships between kin, and the idea that people should live in harmony with all living things.
2. ‘White Paper” refers to the official document issued by authorities or governments to outline policies. The title is used in an ironic way here, indicating the overbearing nature of bureaucracy.
The Wake,
Emma Willemse, The Wake (2024). Found remnant of a dugout canoe, paper pulp drawing on scrim fabric. 310x40x90cm
Emma Willemse, TheWhitePaperBoat (2024). Found dugout canoe, found antique printing press, handmade paper. 265x40x75cm
Artist Statement: Ingrid Bolton
In my artistic practice, I explore the intricate connections between humanity, nature, and the remnants of mining through the lens of Kincentricity—the understanding that all elements of existence are interrelated and dependent on one another. This exhibition Realign is a dialogue with the majestic fever tree forest in the Pafuri area of the Kruger National Park, which is unique ecosystem shaped by both natural processes and climate change. Vachellia xanthophloea features a unique lime green bark that is coated in a golden yellow powder, from which its name is derived: the Greek word xanthos means yellow.
The process of extracting coal dust and transforming it into ink evokes a duality: the raw material signifies industrial power, while the gentle act of creation serves as a meditation on fragility. The process involves circular grinding of the coal powder on glass with a glass muller. The softer the sound of the grinding, the finer the ink: just a whisper is required for this ink. Marks made with charcoal pay homage to the formidable fever tree forest that stand resilient, formed through flooding and the chance alignment of timing, seed availability and water. These trees are ephemeral in nature, with a limited lifespan once the flood plain dissipates. Stoic yet vulnerable, they symbolise both the fragility of our ecosystems and the tenacity required to endure amid climate change. Utilizing coal dust and charcoal on paper, I create visual narratives that evoke the essence of the fever tree forest. The texture and depth achieved through these mediums symbolize the sediment layers of both the land and our histories. The use of coal dust specifically reflects the historical ties to mining, drawing parallels between extraction and the rich, yet vulnerable, resources we share with the natural world.
In the work titled Burden my technique involves the seeping of coal dust through fabric in a funnel - an act of filtration that symbolically mirrors the way natural elements intersect, overlap, and coexist. Through the incorporation of stitching of mapping symbols on this coal-soaked linen, I engage with the narrative of place and the impact of human actions on the environment. The linen fabric echo’s centuries of connection to land and memory, inviting contemplation on how we navigate the spaces we share. My work challenges viewers to rethink their relationship with nature, consider the fragility of our ecosystems, and appreciate the profound interdependence that defines our existence. Each stitch serves as a reminder of the intricate network that binds humanity to the land, urging us to acknowledge our responsibility as stewards of the earth.
The smaller drawings of fever trees come together into a visual representation of the forest, illustrating how individual lives contribute to a larger ecosystem. The horizon line serves as a guiding constant in my work - a visual anchor that binds diverse elements of my practice together. It symbolizes the delicate balance between our world and the natural environment. This meeting point acts as a metaphor for our collective responsibility: even the smallest gestures have the power to shape the vast landscapes we inhabit.
I invite you to realign our world, to reflect on the tangled threads of connection that bind us and to recognize that it is within these very connections that hope and renewal can flourish. Each piece is not merely an object but a testament to resilience - a reminder that through understanding and collaboration, we can nurture the delicate balance between humanity and nature.
Ingrid Bolton, Forest IX, (2025). Monotype with coal dust ink. 30x30cm
