Lyall Sprong’s recent solo exhibition: “God Shaped wholes” feels like a kind of homoeopathic practice with land, rock and place. Rather than potentizing fluid forms, as a homoeopath would do, Sprong works in ground down and metabolises earth, rock and sand, from significant sites around Southern Africa. Using a very unique slow contemplative practice of gathering soils and earth substances from rituals, walks, encounters, conversations and other ways of gathering or wit(h)nessing each other, the more than human world, in place, he brings the rocks, soils, clays etc, and grounds them down in a unique and particular process of making substances to paint or make with. Although Sprong would consider all these activities as ways of listening. From these substances Sprong, crafts etheric abstract images and sculptures which tenderly and delicately hold such thick memory and ancestry at the same time. Each work is a memory, prayer, conversation and thoughtful imagination, or way of listening to the land. These exquisitely realised abstracts, which explore balance, touch, tactile enquiries into voids and wholeness or what Alan Kaplan calls: “Active absences”.

The space between the formative forms are as significant as the forms themselves. In Sprong’s words:

“I did not know what would be or why I began, but I knew that I wanted to get outside of time. I am told that you can speak to rocks if you get outside of time. And if you can speak with rocks then you can speak with anyone"

Not to or for, but with anyone. Speaking which is as much listening. Listening that is as much, feeling— for sympathies and antipathies— for new tracks and pathways that happen in the tension of difference— between people and the wild. Many of these rocks, have been found on paths in places of power that speak with me — as feelings, which I carry with me. The feeling of health, of beauty, of being attentive, and of being a small part. Paintings are made with direct colour. Between paintings there are a few things that I have either made or found at the junctures of different worlds.”

Sprong reminds us that the most significant practice of wit(h)nessing, is listening.