Abstract:
The Composite project (2025) comprises fourteen new artworks presented across three group exhibitions and a solo exhibition held from 20 September to 20 October 2025 at The Viewing Room Gallery in Pretoria. The group exhibitions formed part of Wild at White River Gallery, Mpumalanga (10 May – 1 June 2025); Wild at Attic Atelier, George, Western Cape (16 April – 17 May 2025), as well as the international ONAVU exhibition at Galerie Latuvu, Bages, France (5 July – 6 September 2025). All presentations included artist walkabouts. The works remain permanently accessible at: https://www.elfriededreyer.com/composite.
Description:
The works engage with the shifting dynamics of the natural world, where floods, fires, and erratic weather patterns have become a new evolutionary constant. Seasonal rhythms are increasingly destabilised: spring arrives earlier, midsummer is disrupted by cold fronts, and droughts give way to sudden flooding. Situated within the discourse of the Anthropocene, my intermedial practice explores the entangled consequences of human activity on ecological and geological systems. Land is approached not only as a site of environmental crisis but as a palimpsest, a kind of layered repository of memory, transformation, and deep time.
Within this framework, archetypal dualities of male and female are invoked as foundational principles in nature: the maternal is associated with soil, nurture, and regeneration; the paternal with stone, structure, and endurance. Rock functions as an archive, inscribed with traces of geological formation and anthropogenic disruption. Landscape is conceived as a sentient entity, its language apprehended through sight, sound, and spatial awareness.
The intersection of sound and image produces a composite palimpsest of sensory impressions. In the context of the Anthropocene, this translation acquires urgency in relation to deafness, where sign language operates as both method and metaphor—a reflection of humanity’s inability, or refusal, to heed environmental warnings. Deafness and sign language recur as formal and conceptual devices, foregrounding a broader reluctance to engage with environmental crisis. Through this lens, the work opens territories of meaning between body, environment, and time.
The Composite series engages the four elements—fire, earth, air, and water—to address cycles of evolution, destruction, and renewal. More broadly, my practice investigates worldmaking—natural, virtual, and personal—and the ways in which such worlds are constructed and inhabited as layered repositories of history, memory, and experience. These concerns often unfold through tensions between utopian imaginaries and their counterpoints: dystopia and heterotopia.
