In Afterland

What happens in Afterland? A circus horse and its rider perform above the skeletons of trees, cradled by their trapezoid tightrope. A gathering of clouds hovers in the bleached sky of a different weather system, its cargo of rain withheld from the dry earth by a tight rectangle. God’s animals gather peacefully around Adam in the open veld, their eyes discreetly surveying the landscape. An artist meets some of her ancestors, brings them to see where she lives. 

The trees, the moody sky, the veld are utterly familiar. The horse and rider, the clouds, the mythical creatures gathered in a biblical scene have been encountered before, elsewhere. What are they doing here, together and yet living so separately in our knowledge of them?

In Lien Botha’s works depicting Afterland the presence of landscapes that fill the frames, and of imported elements detached from their own home ground on distant canvases, invites recourse to the concept of the “figure and ground” as a way in to their interpretation, a concept used by students of the development of perception in the young child.

“The development of figure–ground perception begins the day the baby can focus on an object. The faces of caregivers, parents, and familiar objects are the first to be focused on and understood. As babies develop, they learn to distinguish the objects they desire from their surroundings.”

The act of distinguishing between ground and figure, of recognising the object of desire, involves drawing on an already existing repertoire of recognition strategies for what matters, and what is incidental – a hierarchy of meanings the viewer ascribes to different aspects of the scene being viewed.

“If a viewer’s gaze is fixated on a particular region, the viewer is more likely to view the fixated region as the figure.”

On what does the viewer’s gaze fixate in each of Botha’s compositions? The ground is what we recognise at once, in its literal sense: earth, terrain, territory – a landscape so familiar to South Africans that we can feel it on our skin, even if our feet never leave our cars to walk across it. Perhaps our eyes slide over the modest trees and low-lying bushes, over their muted and seemingly uniform textures and colours; each segment of this ground seems to have a consistent, constant quality, to represent a static ecosystem outside time. Africa outside history. Or, on the terrain a travelling rhinoceros encounters, Africa as an anonymous urban moment with no sense of place, only a road leading elsewhere. The signs of human habitation seem incidental.