A Generous Yield Catalogue (updated)

The phrase, a generous yield, speaks to the harvest of plenty, the promise of a good year - joyful in our knowing that the foreseeable future has been provided for, that we might suffer less. Somewhere, in there, once long ago – was a deity of sorts who represented the harvest, the heavens, and the birth of all things. The very essence of life. Something unknown, something hopeful – perhaps even terrifying.

Gina van der Ploeg works with the bodies of plants. She gathers willow, harvests flax, drags the river for mounds of water-hyacinth and returns home with her haulwhere it is dried and might be mulched, pulped, spun, threaded or woven. Here, the atmosphere is an entity of its own, a warm embrace dense with fine particles shed from an assortment of transformed plant bodies.

Making linen involves a process that starts with flax seed, sowed in early spring, watered regularly and harvested anything between ninety to a hundred days later. Alternatively, thirty days or so after the appearance of their delicate blue flowers. Gina grows her flax on the pavement outside her childhood home. To the uninformed observer, this patch of flax might look like a lush pocket of tall grass. Transforming this material into linen involves harvesting the flax – pulling the entire plant from the soil and processing it by rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, hackling and eventually, spinning. The material extracted through this undertaking, prior to

A Generous Yield

Text by Dominique Edwards

Gina van der Ploeg Exhibition 27 January - 10 February 2024

being spun, is a long, fine, hair-like fibre. This is slow work, bound to the life cycles of plant material and the specific properties their bodies yield, work that involves extensive labour.

The transformation of plant material into rope, thread and cloth is an activity human beings have been involved with for as long as can be remembered. A making-tradition embedded in myth and folklore, connected to the soil, the sun and the sky, the spider and the umbilical cord. A technology presenting a particular kind of knowledge, sense-making and understanding, that through its evolution over thousands of years brings us from the seemingly simple stem of a plant, to the Jacquard loom and eventually, the digital neural networks that have become an integral part of our existence. One could argue that ‘we are of plant,’ our predominant fuel, food, the air we breathe and historically the structures we have built all relate in some way to the realm of plant. Botanists dedicated to exploring the development of life on earth would point toward lichen and in particular, fungi - with their extensive mycelial networks, essential to all plantlife and argue instead: ‘we are of fungi.’ Our communion with the soil, regardless of how one might contextualise it, is prophetic, connected to our bodies and involves complex sets of relationships with organisms other than human, and value systems we are yet to comprehend.

The place of seeking to find connection beyond established systems of value and knowledge is where I find Gina, standing among swaying blades of tall grass. Her linen and hyacinth works present us with a newly discovered codex; where she brings the remnants of the plant body from various states in the transformation of the material, into single works - and we encounter the plant meeting its present and past self, all in one place. These curious artefacts contain, hold, and are in themselves both matter and substrate.

The works on show include pieces that read as the fine intestinal scores to songs with legs in unexpected places. They come with the reverence of shroud-like relics, or ancient tapestries retrieved from deep within the earth and ‘topographic maps’ or ‘aerial photographs’ of unknown landscapes consisting of fine particlesrevealing the macro-micro language of worlds approached through various scopes. There is something about chance or accident embedded in how fibres and roots are sedimented in the substrates they create. Their residue perhaps a memory of once, vast bodies of water - now a calligraphic trace, emerging out of its own silt. In this state, the hyacinth debris presents the potential for a divination of sorts; a ‘reading of the root,’ where subject to a particular kind of pareidolia, the ‘parchment’ performs as text, image and sound.

The flax and linen paper works evoke perhaps the language of shed skin, the hide, sack, cloth, book, letter and the herbarium. Embedded into and expanding beyond the rectangle of the linen-cotton paper format, are Gina’s knitted linen pieces. Some of these veiled ‘texts’ gently encase the paper with their net-like verse. Others sit neatly in the centre of the pulp-matrix as a precious relic. One of them breaks the format of the page on either side with its beginnings and endings. Narrative seems to be implied by these beautiful hidelike letters - written with such abundant joy, frivolity and generosity that they spill into the world as something soft and tangible - abandoning the paper substrate to never return.

All of this relates somehow to holding things together. There are different ways in which material holds onto itself or other things. There is the initial form of the living plant - cellular, something that retains water, is generative, breathes and exists in relation to the world of soil, mycelial networks, micro-organisms, insects and other animals - the life of the plant as a thing in itself. And then there is the relationship human beings have with this organism - alive, ‘dead’ or decaying and processed; where holding might involve the twisting of fibres into continuous strands of matter, the entwining, knotting and weaving of material into particular configurations, the compressing of short fibres into skins or sheets, and the more invasive sewing or stitching of things. Bringing a new kind of order to the material, a human order.

Gina disrupts the familiarity of that order. She does not present us with neatly spun and woven works that might be understood within the convention of cloth, tapestry, paper or visual art for that matter. Her fibrous amalgamations explore what might be possible with material more analogous to the plant itself. Hence this other language, this other modality for sense-making. One that relies on the body as a multi-sensory organism and a technology or knowledge system in its own rite.

A Generous Yield is in part, the meeting of bodies, that of Gina and ‘plant’ in the abundant making of the work, and the bodies of others who encounter the work. To yield is also a form of surrender - submission - to relent, defer, comply, give way. Gina holds the paradox of the yield as the unwavering concession centuries of submission has required from soil and plant communities, in one hand. And in the other, a codex –revealed by the plant-body when exhumed from its various states. An old song, in a language we forgot a long time ago - but something we can make sense of through meeting the remains of these plant bodies, with those of our own.

Artist’s Statement

The materials used in this body of work are non-indigenous or alien and have either been grown, collected, or harvested by me. What are the possibilities for fibre as pulp, object, and thread? How are edges held and disrupted as fibres disintegrate, tangle, transition, and are unsure of their footing?

These works are connected to space in Cape Town; many of their titles allude to where the materials were collected/grown/harvested and the indigenous fauna and flora that have disappeared as invasive species take over. However, they are also placeless as the fibres have been harvested from in-between spaces such as verges, pavements, waterways, and building sites. The installations, sculptures, and paper works encourage a focus on material and process and are slightly curious, holding presence as iterations of themselves and the shapes of farms, rivers, bodies, mounds, and heaps.

Enquiries: +2784 871 7103; gina.vdploeg@gmail.com

To have linen

Hand grown linen on pure linen and cotton paper

44cm x 44cm SOLD

Edges disrupted

Hand grown linen on pure linen and cotton paper

48cm x 34cm

R6,500

To hold linen

Hand grown linen on pure linen and cotton paper with ochre

60cm x 44cm

R7,000

Princess Vlei

Hyacinth roots on pure linen and cotton paper

60cm x 44cm SOLD

Pulp sheet

Pure linen and cotton paper pulp

52cm x 42cm x 12cm

R7,500

Can be sold as set with Paper pelt

Mirrored patches on Garfield and Monroe

Hand grown linen on pure linen and cotton paper

48cm x 64cm

R9,000

A Tankwa tell Hand grown linen on pure linen and cotton paper with ochre

50cm x 37cm

R6,500

South Easter Hand grown linen on pure linen and cotton paper

60cm x 44cm

R7,000

Hyacinth roots on pure linen and cotton paper

60cm x 44cm

R7,000

A return to Goukamma Banana pod with hemp

190cm x 45cm (dimensions variable)

R14,500

Zeekoei Vlei

Linen pelt

Hand grown linen chaff

16cm x 42 cm x 30cm

(dimensions variable)

Not for sale

I could have cooked with these

Banana pod with hemp

6cm x 28 cm x 17cm

R6,000

Patch

Handmade hyacinth paper, hyacinth stem and roots

180cm x 260cm

180cm

R23,000

There is still willow here

Belgian willow

62cm x 75cm x 42cm

R12,000

There used to be eland here

Hyacinth stems

62cm x 75cm x 42cm (dimensions variable)

R12,000

Root mat

Hyacinth roots with cotton thread

46cm x 28cm x 5cm

R4,500

A generous yield

Hand grown linen with cotton thread

97cm x 105cm

RESERVED

Paper Pelt

Pure linen and cotton paper pulp

8cm x 26cm x 14cm

(dimensions variable)

R3,000

Can be sold as set with Pulp Sheet

Harvest

Flax plant

85cm x 65cm x 65cm

Not for sale

There used to be honeybush here

Port Jackson willow

62cm x 75cm x 42cm

R12,000

Ndabeni Maitland offramp

Hyacinth paper in pure linen and cotton paper

60cm x 44cm

R7,000

Once a hunch, now a nest

Hyacinth paper with cotton thread

38cm x 28cm x 5cm

R5,000

Japanese backstrap loom

Scrap wood, metal, bamboo, twine, cotton and hemp

230cm x 200cm x 105cm

Not for sale

A real farmer once told me I plant militant flax

rows

Hand grown linen with hemp and ochre

280cm x 38cm

(dimensions variable)

RESERVED

A waterway Dried hyacinth stems

Dimensions variable (installation arrangement changes throughout exhibition)

Not for sale

A common rest

Flax chaff

50cm x 250cm x 130cm

Not for sale

Knowing the new harvest

Flax seed pods

10cm x 21cm x 17cm

Not for sale

Flax nest by the Cape Sparrows

Flax plant and mixed vegetation, feathers

42cm x 28cm x 22cm

Not for sale

But the rows ripple as they grow

Hand grown linen with ochre

110cm x 56cm

(dimensions variable)

R13,500

Ends become and begin

Hand grown and spun linen with various wood

125cm x 85cm x 25cm

Not for sale

Shuttle Yellowwood, ochre

8cm x 43cm 3,5cm

Not for sale