The Memory of Sand I

“There will be beauty , but not as it was before. Meditations in turbulent times.”

This is what Metelerkamp's calls his “mantra for sanity in a time of ecological crisis”. His paintings are a product of a modern day (yet ancient) alchemy. They are almost mythological artefacts in a world that sometimes feels like it has mythological or mystical amnesia. In his particular approach to wit(h)nessing, he surfaces through careful and meditative practice, a profound connection to place, in his words: 

“We live in a time in earth’s history when loving keenly means being brave enough to fall into love with place in spite of the prospect of imminent loss. And so, I head out, Digging in the dark spaces beneath the waterfall for the softest clays. Drying. Crushing dust between fingers. Harvesting leaves from the lower branches, savouring the rustle of trees in the hot summer wind. Brewing up of black inks over the fire. Drawing oil from bitter seeds. These materials and the colours that I’ve worked with all drawn from the places that have held me in transitional phases of my own life. The black inks, indelible marks of fynbos alchemy. The pinks and ochres, chalky meditations birthed from wet spaces deep below us.” 

Through the use of natural materials gathered from the land where he lives, the making of the ink is as much the artwork as the final painting itself. Like Weston and others in this exhibition, Metelerkamp’s main medium is time, which he uses to craft an intimacy with the land, reflecting transitions in his own life. In the doldrums of despair, Metelerkamp reaches deep into the earth, and collaborating with fynbos, water, heat and time, finds the regenerative power of ecologies to always find ways to meet each other. As Metelerkamp explains: “From the extinct wilderness from which all life brewed and swam and crawled aeons ago, towards which I now brew and swim and crawl. From the once degraded valleys of my childhood returning to health, to the mountain land I currently call home, these are my spaces of psychic sanctuary and regeneration. I hunger for these eddies and counter currents, the small pockets of land returning to abundance and diversity The quiet testaments to the potential for our own human (re)lating to place as the world goes up in smoke.”

Metelerkamp abandons the notation of pristine wilderness (a colonial construct), which he sees as rightfully extinct now, and rather explores into what then fills the void left in the seat of our collective consciousness. Inspired by Lesley Le Grange who speaks of situated inquiry : a paradigm to creation sourced from embodied knowledge of place, he sees his creative wit(h)nessing practice as: “a sensual mediation with medium and with place. An act through which to enmesh within material flows of time, earth and cosmos. A weaving myself into the matter of landscape… or as Bayo Akomolafe says, To be human is to be immersed in a sensuous world that does things to do you. Thank goodness…”