Nature Study

When entering the main gallery space, there is a pull to view Brundrit’s exhibition from left to right, in a clockwise manner. Large albatross shadowgrams line the first half of the gallery. The artist placed a dead albatross on photosensitive paper and exposed it to light to create the shadowgrams. Brundrit aimed to capture the direct scale and size of the bird as it is in life in order to impress upon the viewer the environmental and existential concerns underpinning this exhibition.

The size of the bird is overwhelming, even unsettling. There is nonetheless a kind of beauty inherent in these shadowgrams, especially the grace of the animal represented, wings outstretched. In her exhibition notes the artist states that each depiction of the three animals in the exhibition should be read in conjunction with a different text. Brundrit provides Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) as a referral text to the albatross shadowgrams. The poem describes the killing of an albatross by a seafarer, who pays for his action by enduring a life of solitude, burdened by the consequence of his deed. In the accompanying text, Brundrit further describes how albatrosses are victims of long-line fishing in the Southern Ocean, and that their breeding grounds are also under threat.

A shadowgram of snakeskins follows. Brundrit writes that the snake is also under threat, but does not say what snake, or how; we are left to assume that it is due to human fault. Brundrit offers the book of Genesis as the accompanying text. Genesis, which presents the snake (Satan in disguised form) as the cause of Adam and Eve’s cursed existence and expulsion from Paradise, has for millennia burdened the snake with a negative stigma.

These reflections of cursed existence and burden feed into the colour photographs that follow the shadowgrams. Nature Study 1 – 4 comprises four photographs: of the albatross, the snakeskin residue, a dead baboon, and a self-portrait of the artist. The precision of detail in these photographs, shot in a formal style against a white background, encourages the viewer to step closer and study the images. Their crispness allows the viewer to notice the tiny particles of ice present on the baboon, for example. The linking text here is Barbara Smuts’s response to J.M Coetzee’s polemical fiction, The Lives of Animals (1999).
 
With the image of the baboon one can see the worlds of animals and humans connecting through the physical similarities we share; the exhibition thus effectively concludes with the baboon. But the human portrait, which links the worlds of animals and humans, is also the artist’s self-portrait. By presenting herself in relation to the animals, all of them confronted by burden and cursed existence, Brundrit may also be gesturing to her sexuality as a lesbian on the periphery of heteronormative society.  The artist, like her animal kin, must bear a stigma as 'other'.

Jessica van der Hoek holds a BA (Honours) in Art History and is currently completing her Masters degree at the University of Cape Town.