Big Bird

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”.