EVERARD READ / BARBARA WILDENBOER - SUPERNATURAL by THE LAKE PUBLISHING

SUPER/NATURAL —

BARBARA WILDENBOER

SUPER/NATURAL —

BARBARA WILDENBOER

acknowledgements —

I would like to thank the following people who played an important role in realising this exhibition and catalogue: My late father, Jan Snyman, for his love, generous support and genuine interest in my work. He was and still is a great inspiration. Emma Vandermerwe from Everard Read Gallery for valuable input and guidance regarding curatorial aspects of the show, and for always being available and encouraging. Charles Shields of the Everard Read Gallery for agreeing to host the exhibition. Lena Sulik, Wahieb Abrahams, Jake Read and all the other gallery staff for their ongoing assistance. Azu Nwagbogu for writing the introduction to the catalogue. Richard Alwin Fidler for collaborating and sharing his knowledge of the stars. Miranthe Staden Garbett for her passionate commitment in writing the catalogue essay. Her genuine interest in the body of work resulted in an essay that serves as a true and inspired voice for the exhibition. THE LAKE PUBLISHING for the catalogue layout and design. Dave De Witt for his carpentry skills and Mikhela Hawker for her abilities as silversmith. Mike Hall for the installation photographs. InTouch Framers as well as Framed BY ANTON for the framing. Friends and family, especially Leah Hawker, Adala Michelle Prevost, Miko Minnie and all others who were available to assist in many unexpected ways.

Contents —

INTRODUCTION by Azu Nwagbogu A STRANGE GAZE: SUPER/NATURAL UNVEILED by Miranthe Staden Garbett THE LENS THE LIBRARY THE GAME THE MAP BIOGRAPHIES SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS SOLO EXHIBITIONS COLOPHON

Humanity’s ‘progress of knowledge’ and the ‘evolution of consciousness’ have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all our faculties—intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational—enter the process of knowing. How we approach “the other,” and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including our own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate. —Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the far-fetched, and those who believe that ‘belief ’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method’. Between these two extremes there is enough scope for believing the reasonable and reasoning on sound beliefs. —Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance

PHYSICS OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 30 x 11cm

TOUCH WOOD, 2020 KIAAT LADDER WITH SILVER INLAY 358 x 20 x 4.5cm

INTRODUCTION —

Azu Nwagbogu There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

UPER/NATURAL by Barbara Wildenboer explores the boundaries of what is known and knowable about existence and reality by embracing not only art and science but also alternative phenomena which collude and collide under this subtext. Altered books are the primary motifs embodying not only the fundamental—and perennial—epistemological quest for validation as to the very possibility and meaning of knowledge but also the equally basic and unending ontological quest for validation as to the very possibility and meaning of existence. Wildenboer’s altered book creations surrender to the beauty of not needing the right scholarly answers, and creating one’s own links to fill-in the gaps. In SUPER/NATURAL, Wildenboer uses scientific texts that span from biology to astrology, physics to astronomy, alchemy to chemistry. Under Wildenboer’s dexterous care, H.G. Wells’ The Science of Life glides in a manner that the human body is only capable of while dreaming. Indeed, observing the work feels like an instance of jamais vu, a dream. You witness this for the first time but you have had this dream several times before because everyone dreams of flight. The carefully amended pages criss-cross to form a light yet powerful wing skeleton, a metaphor for the transformative power of books to transport the reader to phantasmagoric dreamworlds. Wildenboer’s interventions may render her books unreadable in the traditional sense, but they introduce alternate knowledge systems that defy canon and welcome the artfulness of science. Through Wildenboer’s book modifications, she makes science visible in all its ungovernable, disobedient glory. The process of nullifying the printed text, creates space for new fields of erudition to emerge. SUPER/NATURAL is thus simultaneously a template for a new type of taxonomy about knowledge and existence, and an exhibition in which ontology-validating disciplines provide only a framework for new artistic structures to emerge. To be useful, an investigation of this sort requires a reliable currency or medium of exchange. Photography is the ballast for SUPER/NATURAL. Through analogue and digital photographic processes she creates work that mostly consists of collage, photoand paper-construction and digitally animated collage works and book arts. The old cliche, ‘books are magical’, comes to mind but with SUPER/NATURAL the remediation transcends and sublimates the reading process and the various pieces in the exhibition offer what can be known through a sort of panpsychism. Wildenboer’s history with photography is obvious in her current practice. At its core, photography proposes a search for truth and meaning, and ultimately reveals this exploration to be both futile and enlightening. Similarly with collage making, truth and meaning are revealed, not through accurate documentation of reality, but rather though intentional and accidental framing, flattening and juxtaposition. The physical sciences are principally focused on measurement and observation but the more intrinsic knowing is deeper and is qualitative. It has been a decade since Wildenboer began working on Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large, and this exploration has led to SUPER/NATURAL: a departure from scientific observation, measurement and all those vaunted political ontological promises of photography as a medium. She remediates, collages and, assembles, builds through her art and offers us work with feeling. Imagine a camera shutter. It purports to allow light through so we obtain a measurement of the truth. It was Werner Heisenberg who espoused the Uncertainty Principle, a theory that on a subatomic level, makes known the impossibility of measuring displacement and position. Wildenboer does away with measurement and offers us the truth of her art in SUPER/NATURAL. 4

SUPER/NATURAL —

EXHIBITION NATAL CHART

26° 22° 22°

18° 28° 05° 15°

08°

14’ 01’

25’

20° 43’

14’

55’

11’

02’ 43’

13’ 20°

12 Nov 2020,Thu 6:00 pm EET - 2:00 Cape Town, South Africa 33° S55’ 018° E22’ Geocentric Placidus True Node

55’ 51’ 49’

01° 19° 14°

A strange gaze: SUPER/NATURAL unveiled —

Miranthe Staden Garbett

It is a game, an enigma for those who want to know. It is not to be understood and known—Mirra Alfassa

eet SUPER/NATURAL. Born on 12 November 2020 at 6pm, in Cape Town, South Africa, under a sky of momentous planetary convergences. This moment of birth makes SUPER/NATURAL a Scorpio with a Libra moon. Her nature is otherworldly; her slightly spooky, bristling energy is magnetic. Wild at heart, but not crude, she could easily seduce you. She’ll transfix your gaze with her beauty. In the end, this miraculous entity intends to transform you. But not before she challenges you. You will be tested with an uncomfortable choice, intrigued by games, puzzled with maps, perplexed with contradictions. Her intricate complexities have been dissected and reconfigured with precision, according to the artist’s inner vision. With a bat of her Kirlian eyelashes, she might turn your world to ashes to see if your phoenix rises. Her diplomatic Venusian charm will take the edge off, bringing grace, balance and refinement to these bewildering energies, making them more enticing, entirely palatable. Her delicate frame can barely contain the perfect storm that is at her core. Her pristine and polished veneer belies the chaos from which she emerges now, suspended in time, before the gaze of perfect strangers. I know all of this because I am not an impartial bystander at this birth. I am the wordsmith; the scribe recruited to witness, interpret and record the story of SUPER/NATURAL for posterity. I was in the background when the artist was in the throes of assembling her many bits and quarks, as she was forged Frankenstein-like from discarded parts into Art. I noted the twists and turns of their mutual evolution; an elegant whirlwind, but a whirlwind nonetheless. I saw how the artist both surrendered to, and drove the process, via a laser-beam stream of consciousness. I heard tell of the veritable army of collaborators on board; the many midwives assisting to bring the artist’s vision into being.

For those who don’t know, a solo show is the work of many hands. A force of nature, Wildenboer draws many into her spiral of creativity. She fits the description of a new breed of movers and shakers, called ‘glue people’, whose systemic view and natural empathy pulls synergistic teams together and challenges all involved by “stretching their boundaries” (Irwin, 2019). In the build-up to this, her 13th solo exhibition, I gleaned a behind-the-scenes cast and crew of Little Prince-like characters and scenarios: a grieving daughter—the artist herself—alchemist/horologist/time-traveller/mapmaker, all rolled into one; a good father—whose blessings the daughter seeks, a man of scientific bent and the artist’s erstwhile biggest fan; then there’s the elusive Vedic astrologer appointed to confer a disarming charm and dignity upon the ceremony; the silversmith friend who turned a solid silver ring into numinous string, hardware into software; a threshold from one world to another, some stairways to heaven and up/down spiralling snakes…ascensions, descensions, and counter-revolutions; a daydreaming astronomer, conspicuously absent but for projections; constellations; clouds with silver linings; apparitions; a glimpse of hidden twins; some deadly sins; the wood of a kiaat tree; and a rather mysterious orchid, in lieu of the Little Prince’s Rose. On this quest, the artist took her usual hands-on approach, slashing through centuries of literature, shredding through stacks of printed media and ephemera, coaxing out compositions, layers of correspondences and threads of meaning. SUPER/NATURAL is the artist’s exploration of the contentious territory between what is seen and not seen, known and unknown. Both involve levels of nature. The supernatural also operates on ‘natural’ laws—it’s just that they are obscure and hidden from our normal gaze. Take electromagnetism for instance, the invisible glue that holds the celestial orbits, star constellations and sub-atomic bodies together. Discovered, named and classified by scientists in 1820, its mysteries continue to baffle the best minds in the West.

PHYSICS OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 2020 ALTERED BOOK (detail)

As far back as Plato, a branch of philosophical science, namely philosophical idealism, identified supramental and elemental forms as the direct cause of what appears to our human senses as ‘natural’. In this worldview, they were considered more reliable, constant, universal, perfect, and natural than ‘mere’ nature. These supernatural laws found universal expression in mathematics, music, geometry and art. Plato made it clear that these mathematical propositions—the only things that could be regarded as unassailably true— referred not to physical or visible objects (like squares, triangles, spheres and cubes, that might be drawn or physically constructed) but to idealised entities. According to Nobel Prize winning scientist, Roger Penrose (2004), the idea of an intelligent designer rather than random selection can also be seen in Pythagoras’ vision of the invisible force of number and arithmetical concepts, generating and governing the nature of things. It is in this invisible plasma, this liminal space, between solid rock and the hard place of fixed mathematical laws, that the supernatural bobs and weaves, nimbly evading detection, like a ninja shadow. Because she is often not what she appears to be, this text serves as a guide to reveal and suggest SUPER/NATURAL’s more obscure aspects to a stranger’s gaze. To be sure, supernatural has always been strange. An old French word with Latin roots, strange means ‘coming from the outside’ and implies something that is from elsewhere, foreign, unfamiliar, estranged, separated, not properly belonging, ‘Other’. Synonyms include curious, bizarre, weird and, funnily enough, the name Barbara. The artist’s own name means strange and otherworldly. Weird, isn’t it? In the same vein, the new science of quantum reality looks weird from where we stand. And while our scientific understanding of the supernatural is still evolving, in her current incarnation, SUPER/NATURAL is quantum. A walking talking contradiction. As quantum particles have the uncanny ability to appear in two places at once and influence each other half a universe apart, SUPER/NATURAL defies linear logic and proposes instead that we ponder on a paradox. With the flick of that forward slash, a gauntlet is thrown before us. The forward slash is a recurring ‘motif ’ in Wildenboer’s world; the title of her master’s thesis was ‘Present Absence/Absent Presence’. She uses this double-edged (s)word play to cleave two wor(l)ds together and apart: the ‘natural’ one, which presents itself ostensibly to our biological senses, and the ‘super’ world above it, which does not. The name SUPER/NATURAL is an ‘altered’ word that toggles with these entities, in a tango that takes two; showing us that a fight can be a celebration. Known/Noum. Karma/Kama. Two sides of the same coin. The question is: to flip or to conjoin? The forward slash fortunately provides options to play with, and can either signal a connection or a conflict between two things. Here it indicates both. And as a slash punctuates, binds and strikes the world of words, so does a cleaving device splice/slice worlds, through the very fabric of matter. Once again, this glue person’s medium is her message. Her other weapon of choice—a knife, a blade, scissors, keys, a slash, a stroke of luck. Like the slash, the verb to cleave has two very different meanings. Splitting something apart with a sharp instrument or the opposite—clinging, adhering firmly, sticking to something like glue. Etymologically, a cleave originally referred to an instrument for opening locks. From old spear, the words ‘keie’ and ‘ki’ refer to a tool to cleave or split with. A cleft is also a dent. A scar. A hollow. A gap. So, as you take that step across the threshold dividing the ordinary world from SUPER/NATURAL, mind the gap. With 20/20 hindsight, we tend to see the missing chinks and blind spots of history more glaringly. The gap between what we (thought we) knew then, and what we (think we) know is a chasm. Century old books on astronomy, technology, physics and biology are outdated, incomplete. New knowledge makes them increasingly obsolete, bound for the trash heap. Science is by no means static; by its nature it must question and change, adapt to reflect new knowledge as it arises. The quantum world is full of startling and discombobulating discoveries that have wreaked havoc on the mechanistic worldview espoused for centuries in books like these. For ages, storytellers, sages, philosophers, artists and scientists across cultures have warned us that our eyes have a tendency to lie. Appearances are deceiving, seeing is not believing, nothing is obvious. Research confirms that truth really is stranger than fiction. Beneath the surface of things or (in this case) above, there’s another world at play. While the role of science is to demystify and decode the supernatural, it remains obscure and elusive. Recent forays into quantum physics—a field of reality that cannot be seen with our physical eyes—continue to reveal strange phenomena, spooky actions and mysterious entanglements. For example, “if you observe a particle in one place, another particle—even one light-years away—will instantly change its properties, as if the two are connected by a mysterious communication channel” (Popkin, 2018). In the quantum universe, the observer’s gaze is a determining factor in the creation of reality. Likewise, a believer’s beliefs will influence his reality. Clearly, there is still much more to be understood about the supernatural nature of reality, its invisible forces and patterns, and the part we as humans play in observing and/or co-creating it. One thing is for sure—the nature of our gaze matters. 8

PHANTASMAGORIA, 2020 ANIMATED PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHS – continuous loop (installation view) 9

I see SUPER/NATURAL as a precisely timed dance, a tango with chance, tightly calibrated chaos. Objects, imbued with scientific and sentimental import, are singled out for our consideration and the artist’s special attention. We leave familiar linear time and space behind as we depart from the first threshold, marked by seven Quanta clocks. In the supernatural world of pure forms, numbers have great significance; seven means completion and perfection. These circular hand-cut maps have clock mechanisms that spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. The twist mimics how quanta dance. Likewise, the maps, reconfigured according to the alchemist’s secret recipe, no longer match up with any known territory. Their scrambled co-ordinates dismantle our bearings. In their altered states, they are now maps of nowhere familiar. Instead, like Alice’s rabbit hole, or Dorothy’s tornado, they present a portal to a stranger realm. In myth and story, as explained by Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, at the threshold between worlds, appointed guardians and monsters will try to stop you from starting your quest into the unknown. Scare tactics and intimidations are arranged to test the initiate’s courage and readiness for the journey beyond their comfort zone. Once you have passed through the Quanta portal, you will be faced with another doorway. This one has a conspicuously looming ladder propped up against it, and is mischievously titled Touch Wood. The ladder is easy enough to walk under. However, to pass through you’ll need to conquer or ignore/suppress/deny/dismiss any niggling superstitions. At this point, you may—or may not—experience some cognitive dissonance. This ‘booby trapped’ entrance is a nod to Dada, referenced throughout by the artist’s choice of material (found objects) and method (chance/intuition). It also invokes a prankster-style Fluxus intervention, designed to create an awkward or unpredictable experience, making you, the viewer, more aware that at this point you are exiting the ordinary world. The silver cord was once a ring. Now you’ll find it strung from rung to rung, along the centre of the ladder. This sliver of moonlight might pull your eyes up the ladder as you hasten past it. Or you may choose to linger longer under it. Those with serious reservations can avoid it altogether, though this will mean having to make a detour to use a back entrance. Either way, a choice must be made. SUPER/NATURAL is here to remind us that each choice determines a different destiny. Ironically, ladders usually have positive and uplifting connotations. This imposing ladder reminds us that our choices are usually underpinned by a belief system. At this second threshold, we are invited to ponder the quirks of our own belief systems in relation to the ‘quarkiness’ of the SUPER/NATURAL experience. She playfully demonstrates a variety of ways in which humans have felt compelled to understand, interpret, measure, control, capture, depict, fix and plunder her mysterious domains. Wildenboer has curated some choice examples of the tools humans have used to do this handiwork. We find numerous assisted ready-mades gathered here, found objects that the artist has altered. Familiar maps, books, texts, scientific devices, contraptions and occult apparatus have been appropriated, recycled, refurbished and repurposed according to the artist’s vision. Consider how these curiosities on display, these hallmarks of culture and progress, have reached your doorstep and now touch your life. Take a deep look into the mysterious nature of your reality. The exercise of questioning our assumptions and looking deeper will also serve us well as we move towards the astronomical event of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, set to take place on 21 Dec 2020. This moment that astrologers have been awaiting with bated breath heralds a shift for humankind from one way of being to another. Some say it’s a shift from a dark age to a golden one, in which humanity at large is set to reset, to evolve marvellous new ways of being and seeing. For there is something that sees deeper than the telescope and expands our awareness further than any photograph, and that is our mind. Once you have passed under the ladder you will be faced with divergent paths. Open your mind and approach the elegant universe of collages, sculptures, photographic works and altered books in the same spirit of adventure and wide-eyed wonder as the artist. Whichever direction you are pulled in, try not to end up back at square one. Will you veer to the left first? Where the secrets of Psyche nestle and the hanging gardens of Babel beckon us to play games of chance and solve visual riddles. Or will the safety of objects, of cold hard facts and instruments pull you toward the right? The artist’s trademark altered books function as narrative clues or subtitles accompanying the other works, referring to subject matter ranging from the history of X-rays, camera obscura, astronomy, physics and the science of life. Follow the clues. To the right you’ll find evidence of the intrepid scientist and bold pioneer. New modes of seeing exploded around the turn of the 19th century. The mirror visions of the camera obscura soon grabbed hold of the collective imagination. Wildenboer marks this moment out in time with a book on camera obscura that she turned into one. That moment when images were first alchemised in a dark box, when apparitions set the stage for a second world, a second life; the mass hallucination that is the sea us goldfish now swim in. What started with the photograph has evolved into the internet of things, an omnipresent hyper-reality, where simulated entities and CGI 10

avatars, like Lil Miquela and her crew of hyper-animated influencers, pout and frolic, increasingly indistinguishable from real humans. The camera was not the only new kid on the block. Many more tools and devices, clocks, machines and lenses were invented by scientists—those wacky Victorian gentlemen with their imperial ambitions—who popularised practical tools that would exponentially extend the limits of our human vision. On display are a telescope and an altered book about X-ray photography. Other tools used to extend human vision, such as the microscope and Kirlian photography, while not directly referenced, have also crept into the fabric of the visual language. Square-shaped books implode into the Radiolarian-like forms typical of 19th century illustrations, exemplified by Ernst Haeckel, the evolutionary scientist/artist whose microscopic visions sparked the Art Nouveau style. Those whiplash tendrils emerged into art via science. Their swirls are mirrored to the left where the Kirlian whirlwinds of Moksha Patam and Psyche flutter and unfurl. A late bloomer, Kirlian photography first captured the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges in 1939. The electric effect is simulated by the collages and adapted books with their lightning strike tentacles, creeping fractals, exploding filaments, and slender tendrils. Really, the whole room is alive with bristling parts, live wires, sparks wriggling, crawling; a bustling nest of activity, frozen in time. Cosmos presides majestically in the centre, holding it all together. Supernature is by definition obscure, oblique, and not directly observable. Yet humans do not tire of searching for the underlying principles that govern the behaviour of our universe. It is a voyage that has lasted for more than two-and-a-half millennia. The idea of an intelligent designer behind this irreducibly complex nature has been argued for by the likes of Penrose in his Road to Reality. This concept could be equated to a religious deity—without the dogma—and is a far cry from those that propound Darwinian evolution. It inspires a sense of awe—a more sublime landscape emerges when nature’s magnificence can be traced back to a benevolent source. Described by science in terms of magnetism and light, by sages, as love. On the topic of love—and its flipside, loss—the story of Phantasmagoria is best told by the artist in her own words. “My father was a man of science. A year and a half ago, I arrived home to find that a small white orchid in a pot had been delivered to my front door. It had a card that read ‘Sorry for your loss’. Nothing else. I asked around in my block of flats if anyone could possibly be the rightful recipient of the plant. It didn’t seem to be meant for anyone so I decided to keep it until someone claimed it. A week later my father had an unexpected stroke and a few days after that he passed away. It was as if the orchid had managed to find its way to me through some weird glitch in the timeline. A few months passed and I came across an old copy of Hildebrand’s Camera Obscura at a local market. This was a later copy, but the first edition was printed in 1839 (the same year Louis Daguerre revealed the secrets of making the daguerreotype to the world). I decided to convert the book into a pinhole camera and attempt to photograph the mysteriously gifted orchid in line with 19th century spirit photography” (Wildenboer, 2020). The outcome of this process is two complementary pieces, Phantasmagoria and Camera Obscura, a conversation between ghosts. A daughter’s meditation on the loss of her beloved father. While this piece is more personal, it is typical of Wildenboer’s endeavour to make a bridge with art. This one to reach across the chasm that separates ancestors from descendants, past from present. A scientific theory that attempts to bridge otherwise incommensurable models and unify all fundamental forces of nature is string theory. The key feature of these strings is that they are not regarded as one-dimensional in the normal sense. The extra dimensions are hidden away from sight by compactification. In string theory, there are no different particles, just tiny loops of string (involving ten or more dimensions) vibrating in different ways. String theory finds some remarkable parallels in the world of myth and symbol. The idea that our universe is made from thread is echoed in the myth of the Moirai, or Fates; three weird sisters who singlehandedly spin, weave and cut the threads of human destiny. Moirai means ‘allotment’, a share of something. Your lot in life is their doing. Each sister has a role to play in the generation, creation and destruction of life. Clotho spins the thread; Lachesis, the disposer of lots, weaves or knots the cloth and assigns to each his destiny; and Atropos the Inflexible, wields ‘the abhorred shears’ and cuts the thread. Wildenboer, renowned as a collage artist, would be easy to cast as the one who cuts. But wait, there’s more to it. She does something else that is entirely surprising. Out of her severing, shredding and splitting, this artful butcher literally spins the very ‘thread’ with which she will recreate another world. Out of the so-called junk and miscellany, she mystically (how she does it, nobody knows) and masterfully transmutes base material into a cornucopia of art, upcycling one man’s waste into another’s gold. She leaves traces of the original source by keeping the titles on the books and in each artwork’s name. But the rest she destroys, dismantles, unravels and rethreads, spinning, sticking and coiling entire new worlds into being, out of the tatters of the old. 11

One last thing that Wildenboer hopes to revive from the ruins, in time, is a message of hope for the possibility of human unity in the face of differing beliefs. It is a principle addressed in Talisman, published 1825, a book about a Christian/Muslim friendship, set in 1190, during the Crusades. In 2020, with its intensified polarisation, the message of transcending our divisions is more pertinent than ever. To this end, Wildenboer makes a way for us through wildly divergent paths. Her revived libraries mark out a space where different ideologies and paradigms float around in peaceful symbiosis, a place where our shared wonder can triumph over the divisions and diversions of belligerent belief. Thus, she succeeds in miraculously fusing the entire process into her art practice, a self-sufficient, self-contained system of creation. In an act of biomimicry, she mirrors the benevolent natural systems around us, in which rot turns to sprout and the oxygen we breathe is nothing other than the excrement of trees. By participating intentionally in the act of co-creation, she opens herself up as a vessel through which creativity can flow. As such, she becomes a conduit for synchronistic unfoldings. Her art is more than a paying occupation; it is a healing meditation. In creating SUPER/NATURAL, the artist is also recreating and reconfiguring herself, while broadly exploring themes of ideology, belief, superstition, predestination, intuition and ancestry. We are invited to gaze at this strangeness and consider the ways in which our own beliefs determine what is possible to know and experience. I, for one, will “as a stranger give it welcome”, that “wondrous strange” confrontation between myself and SUPER/NATURAL, heeding her sobering reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

— NOTE: The issue of the ethics of cutting up books is an elephant in the room that might need addressing. I will do so by means of the following personal anecdote. In January 2020, just before the world was turned upside down, I was at a house-warming party. A recently purchased second-hand book was being passed around between friends. I’ll admit I was somewhat mortified to overhear that the book was bound for the ‘butcher’s’ hands. I do not even remember the title of the book but, as a bibliophile who worked for seven years in a library, a self-appointed guardian of knowledge, I momentarily recoiled at the thought of this barbarian who cuts up books for a living. Fast forward to 12 November 2020. A lot has changed, including my initial reservations about the fine art of bookbutchering. I have changed my tune and will now sing about how the essence of a book can be respectfully transmuted when processed masterfully, lovingly, with focused intent. And, as I see it now, her hands are precisely the place where an exhausted, damaged or unloved book might want to go to die. Barbara Wildenboer is surely the sharpest shearer in the land. And not a barbarian at all. On the contrary, an avid bibliophile whose lucky book is none other than Jorg Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, a book about books. Wildenboer selects a second-hand book and, with enthusiastic precision, begins the reconstructive process of crafting it back into being. Where others see a book, she sees the possibility for alchemy. She sees a blossoming flower, an exploding tree, a wild garden of peculiarities. Through long nights of chaos, confusion and clutter, snipping and sticking, she weaves a brand new web. She has the fullest intention, know-how and conviction to bring her vision into fruition and has worked more than forty days and nights bringing these books to life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hall, MP. 1928. The secret teachings of all ages: An encyclopaedic outline of masonic, hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian symbolical philosophy. Being an interpretation of the secret teachings concealed within the rituals, allegories, and mysteries of all ages. San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Co. Irwin, N. 2019. How to win in a winner-take-all world: The definitive guide to adapting and succeeding in high-performance careers. New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Penrose, R. 2004. The road to reality: A complete guide to the laws of the universe. London: Jonathan Cape. Popkin, G. 2018. ‘Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ spotted in objects almost big enough to see’. Retrieved from https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/einstein-s-spooky-action-distance-spotted-objects-almost-big-enough-see (accessed 01/10/20) Shakespeare, W. 1996. Hamlet. In T. J. Spencer (Ed.), The new Penguin Shakespeare. London: Penguin Books. Stevens, A. 2001. Ariadne’s clue: A guide to the symbols of humankind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Vrekhem, G. 1997. Beyond man: Life and work of Sri Aurobindo and the mother. New Delhi: HarperCollins.

CAMERA OBSCURA, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 19.5 x 14 x 4cm

CAMERA OBSCURA I-XII, 2020 Ed. 1/3 PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHS ON COTTON PAPER 38 x 53.5cm each

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THE LENS

RINGS OF SATURN I-VII, 2020 Ed. 1/3 PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINTS ON COTTON PAPER 62cm, 52cm and 40cm diameter CONSTELLATIONS, 2020 TELESCOPE WITH WOOD, GLASS AND SILVER THREAD 156 x 75 x 77cm

RINGS OF SATURN VI (GRUS), 2020 Ed. 1/3 PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT ON COTTON PAPER 40cm diameter

RINGS OF SATURN VI (PHOENIX), 2020 Ed. 1/3 PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT ON COTTON PAPER 52cm diameter

CONSTELLATIONS, 2020 TELESCOPE WITH WOOD, GLASS AND SILVER THREAD 156 x 75 x 77cm

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries—Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel (1941) Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large is an ongoing project that started in 2011. The altered books are made from found books, particularly old books of maps and atlases. The books become both reference and raw material for sculptures, paper installations and digital animation. The books, sentences, words and letters become elements of a new visual narrative in which the old and new forms co-exist. Through the act of altering books and other paper based objects, the intention is to draw emphasis to our understanding of history as mediated through text or language and our understanding of the abstract terms of science through metaphor.

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THE LIBRARY

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 44 x 64cm

A TEXT-BOOK OF X-RAY DIAGNOSIS, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 43 x 64cm

THE COMPLETE BOOK OF PATIENCE, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 26 x 36cm

THE TALISMAN, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 30 x 37cm

PSYCHE, 2020 HAND-CUT ANALOGUE COLLAGE 132 x 136cm

PSYCHE, 2020 HAND-CUT ANALOGUE COLLAGE (detail)

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THE GAME

MOKSHA PATAM I-IV, 2020 HAND-CUT REPHOTOGRAPHED ANALOGUE COLLAGE Installation view [next page] MOKSHA PATAM I-IV, 2020 HAND-CUT REPHOTOGRAPHED ANALOGUE COLLAGE 82 x 126cm each MOKSHA PATAM IV, 2020 HAND-CUT REPHOTOGRAPHED ANALOGUE COLLAGE (detail) 31

QUANTA I-VII, 2020 HAND-CUT MAPS WITH CLOCK MECHANISM 28cm, 24.5cm, 19cm and 17cm

THE MAP —

QUANTA V, 2020 HAND-CUT MAPS WITH CLOCK MECHANISM 19 x 19cm

TOUCH WOOD, 2020 KIAAT LADDER WITH SILVER INLAY COSMOS, 2020 HAND-CUT PAPER SCULPTURE (installation view)

COSMOS, 2020 HAND-CUT PAPER SCULPTURE 166 x 166cm

COSMOS, 2020 HAND-CUT PAPER SCULPTURE (detail)

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ASTRONOMY, 2020 ALTERED BOOK 26 x 10cm

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Biographies Azu Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival and the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria. He was the interim Director/Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town from April 2018 to August 2019. Nwagbogu is the Director of Art Base Africa, an online journal focusing on contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, and serves on the jury of major art awards and committees such as the Dutch Doc, POPCAP Photography Awards, the World Press Photo, Prisma Photography Award (2015), Greenpeace Photo Award (2016), New York Times Portfolio Review (2017–18), W. Eugene Smith Award (2018), Photo Espana (2018), Lensculture and Magnum. He has curated numerous exhibitions internationally and has contributed texts to several international publications. Over the last two decades, he has worked as an independent curator and culture critic, curating private collections for various prominent individuals and corporate organisations in Africa. Miranthe Staden Garbett’s love of reading and thirst for knowledge led her to wanting to be a journalist like her grandmother, but she was a born teacher, like her mother. She worked for seven years in the biggest library in the Southern Hemisphere and in bookshops in Pretoria and London. In 1999, she unexpectedly fell in love with art, changing her course to spend the next twenty years in art education and research. Garbett has come to believe that art is a superpower. From 2000, she realised her journalist dream when she started writing art reviews for the Pretoria News, and has since written for Design Indaba Magazine, SAJAH, DEFSA, De Arte, Art South Africa & MAP Black Books. She has lectured at UNISA, TUT, PIHE and Open Window, where she spearheaded more holistic teaching methods, and found ways to incorporate personal expression, self-development, manifesto-writing and storytelling into curricula. She has two honours degrees, one in English and French Literature (UNISA), the other in Fine Arts (TUT), where she tackled the topic of the taboo, researching liminal spaces, rites of passage, maps of consciousness, hidden and forbidden knowledge and the potential of art to awaken and transform the human race. Richard Alwin Fidler is a professional astrologer and teacher of astrology. Starting out with conventional modern western astrology, Fidler began exploring Jyotish in the 1990s, gradually integrating it into his methodology. He uses both western and Vedic astrological methods in his practice, bringing knowledge and awareness of Jyotish to the astrological community through his writing, lectures and workshops. After years of self-study he made several trips to India in order to connect with Jyotish at its source and later also to teach. He was awarded the title of ‘Jyotish Martanda’ on an honorary basis from the Kolkata-based Krishnamurti Institute of Astrology in 2014. Fidler is a member of their organising committee for the international conferences which attract leading astrologers from all parts of the world, while on a local level he served as the chairperson of the Cape Town-based Cape Astrology Association for many years. He has been published in several astrology magazines and is often invited to offer comment by the media.

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SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2017–2020: Cut Up / Cut Out, travelling museum exhibition, Bellevue Arts Museum, WA (Jun 30–Oct 20, 2017) Huntsville Museum of Art, AL (Nov 19–Feb 11, 2018), Pensacola Museum of Art, FL (Mar 2–Jun 17, 2018) Ellen Noël Art Museum, Odessa, TX (Jul 19–Oct 14, 2018) Foosaner Art Museum, Melbourne, FL (Nov 10–Feb 3, 2019) Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI (Mar 2–May 26, 2019), Amarillo Museum of Art in Amarillo, TX (Jul 6–Sep 15, 2019), Lamont Gallery in Exeter, NH (Jan 21–Mar 4, 2020). 2020/2018/2017/2016/2015/2014: The Art of the Book, Seager Gray Gallery, San Francisco. 2017: Booknesses: South African Artists’ Books, FADA Gallery, as part of the BOOKNESSES COLLOQUIUM held at the University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg. 2016: Surface and Subtext, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town. 2016: This is Not a Book, The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, California. 2016/2015: Map of the New Art – Imago Mundi, Luciano Benetton Collection, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice and New York. 2015: Ten years of Artists’ Books, a collection of artists’ books curated for the Brooklyn Public Library, New York. 2015: Homage, Everard Read, Cape Town. 2015: The Artist as Author, Klein Karoo Nasional Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn. 2010: Matters Conceptually & Conceptual Matters (part I and II), ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town. 2008–2009: Construct: Beyond the Documentary Photograph (travelling exhibition) Unisa Gallery, Pretoria; KZN Gallery, Durban; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Gallery, Port Elizabeth; Grahamstown Arts Festival (main), Makhanda; Goethe Institute, Johannesburg.

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Solo exhibitions

2020: SUPER/NATURAL, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town. 2020: A Retrospective (online), Festival Artist for the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn. 2019: Folly, Everard Read Gallery, London. 2018: Eros/Thanatos, Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg. 2017: The Invisible Gardener, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town. 2016: Mythematics, Mcontemporary, Sydney. 2015: Something Rather Than Nothing, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong. 2014: The Lotus Eaters, Reservoir Gallery, Oliewenhuis, Bloemfontein; William Humphreys Museum, Kimberley; North West University, Potchefstroom. 2013: Disjecta Membra, Amelia Johnson Contemporary, Hong Kong. 2012: Canaries in the Coalmine, ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town, and Aardklop, Potchefstroom. 2011: Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large, ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town. 2008: Present Absence/Absent Presence, ErdmannContemporary, Cape Town. 2004: Rites of Passage, AVA, Cape Town.

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Colophon

This catalogue was produced for the occasion of Barbara Wildenboer’s exhibition, SUPER/NATURAL, which officially opened at 6pm on the 12th of November 2020 ~ the time and date of which was chosen for its astrological significance. Design and production THE LAKE PUBLISHING Photographs Barbara Wildenboer & Mike Hall Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town, South Africa Printed on Naturalis Absolute White ISBN 978-0-620-90399-8 No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright holders. Everard Read Gallery Cape Town 3 Portswood Road, Portswood Ridge, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001