Ephemera

Abstract

Ephemera is a practice-based creative research output comprising twelve works, consisting of digital photomontages, charcoal studies, and oil paintings, presented as a solo exhibition at the Rust-en-Vrede Gallery, Durbanville, from 4 February to 4 March 2023. The project originates in a single, intimately known site: a stand of milkwood trees bordering fenland, drawn from repeatedly over several years and redrawn seven times to date. This site functions as a personal counterpart to what Mary Oliver called her "Blackwater”, the modest, recurring locus from which a life's work of attention and love for the world is generated. Ephemera takes this sustained, site-specific engagement as its empirical and affective starting point, using it to interrogate how decay in the natural world can be registered materially at a moment when ecological time is being outpaced by digital and geopolitical acceleration. My works pose the following questions: How might an art practice register the widening gap between the slow, geological temporality of natural decay and the compressed, editable temporality of digital-virtual experience? Given the compounding pressures of the climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction, and a post-truth media condition, can a practice rooted in the repeated observation of one small, ordinary site, model what Donna Haraway (2016:1) calls learning "to live and die well with each other in a thick present"? A further, process-level question follows: what is transformed in the image and in the creator when a single motif is forced through successive material translations, from photograph to digital composite to charcoal to oil? The study develops and tests an artistic praxis that materialises the passage of time. Its primary contribution is this praxis itself, not artworks depicting decay alone, and it asks what new ways of existing within a dying world such a praxis might make visible. The methodology is iterative and medium-specific, treating each material as a metaphor. Photographic documentation of the site is reassembled through digital photomontage into a composite, internally coherent image, a simulacrum in the strict sense: a constructed totality with no single photographic original, and therefore a utopian image, exempted from the entropy the unedited photograph would otherwise record. This utopian composite is then reworked in charcoal on paper, both themselves products of decay (charred wood; pulped wood), so that the drawing does not merely depict decay but is materially implicated in it. The act of drawing in charcoal, through friction, smudging, and irreversibility, replaces the infinite editability of the digital file. The charcoal studies are, to some extent, dystopian in their own right: pictorially, they may not diverge markedly from the photomontage. The material process, however, the charring and erasing, re-enacts the destructive transformation that the photomontage's synthetic ideal conceals. Oil painting extends this material line of reasoning even further, its slow drying and layering closing the loop between synthetic origin and embodied re-materialisation. Compositionally, the work is informed by Eric Fischl's use of fragmented, psychologically unresolved figuration to unsettle a single coherent viewpoint, applied here to the assembly of montage fragments into contestable rather than seamless wholes. Furthermore, the work is influenced by Neo Rauch's juxtaposition of incompatible pictorial registers within one surface, which informs the coexistence of utopian and dystopian imagery across the series. Ephemera contributes to contemporary ecological and landscape-based art practice, intersecting with new materialist and posthumanist theory, by demonstrating multi-medium translation through photography, digital, and analogue as a research method for materialising ecological grief and entropy, rather than merely illustrating it. The durational, site-specific method of returning to and redrawing the same milkwoods over successive years further contributes a place-based model of practice-led research to this discipline. The redrawing accumulates into a record of the site's change over time, while the act of returning demonstrates that sustained engagement with a single place can itself constitute a valid research method.