About a hundred metres from artist Helmut Starcke’s home in the seaside hamlet of Betty’s Bay is the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden. It is cocooned in the heart of the Cape Fynbos region, with the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve forming a monolithic backdrop to the floral diversity below.

Fynbos frames Starcke’s house. Seamless fields of scrub – in yellow, lilac, gold and green – snake along the scenic ocean drive between Pringle Bay and Kleinmond. In fact, with around 1 600 plant species, the fynbos appears ubiquitously spread across the region, displaying a floral diversity per unit area that is greater than anywhere else in the world. It makes sense therefore that fynbos, or ‘slender scrub’ as it is translated, literally, from Dutch, should comprise the principal iconography of Starcke’s current body of works.

To those familiar with his prodigious oeuvre, this exhibition revisits a recurring refrain throughout Starcke’s career: his unremitting passion for conservation and his concerns about the potential waste and degradation of natural environments. This show may be read, therefore, as an elegy of sorts to an endangered plant species. But it is also about Betty’s Bay itself – its existence circumscribed by the bookends of the Kogelberg and the sea – as well as a reflection of Starcke’s personal and artistic trajectory.

Rich in visual symbolism, Starcke’s imagery eludes semantic pigeonholes. Yet his metaphysical explorations are articulated at ground level. Intellectually charged and protean, elegant and elegiac, his paintings speak as much of an embrace as they do of a lament. And ultimately they signify a celebration of a creative alchemy that is as transformative, fragile and ineffable as the life cycle of the ‘slender scrub’ itself.

10 October - 09 November

This exhibition brings together works by four photographic artists where camouflage serves as the binding theme. In a literal sense camouflage indicates the combination of colours, materials or illumination in order to conceal humans, animals or objects, or to disguise them as something else. We often associate this phenomenon with images of animals miraculously vanishing in front of our eyes, due to the perfect visual synchronicity between their own outer appearance and that of their immediate environments. Since the introduction of camouflage uniform during World War I – sparking an unexpectedly fruitful collaboration among soldiers, artists and naturalists – camouflage has also attained a strong association with military operations and game hunting activities.

The works on this exhibition explore these different associations with camouflage. The works often serve as a vehicle to speak about the underlying tensions in the artist’s own emotional, social and cultural environments, as well as the artists relation to a South African past littered with traumatic events.

The works of Sethembile Msezane, entitled 'Wrapped', are an attempt at shaping for herself a sense of home and belonging by exploring the tensions between her own cultural heritage and the cosmopolitan urbanism that defines her current social environment. The photographs are of herself wrapped in various materials. The cowhide and beads indicate the uMemulo/uMgonqo Zulu coming-of-age ceremony, which she underwent herself, while the IsiShweshwe cloth references a multi-cultural post-colonial South Africa.

In Réney Warrington’s 'Split Spine' her terminally disabled brother is the subject of her images. By training her lens primarily on the objects and spaces in his life - most of which are of a medical nature due to the state of his mental and physical health - Warrington elicits in the viewer a sense of the discomfort and disconnect experienced while growing up alongside such severe disability and having to face his death daily, which is imminent.

Both Francki Burger and Hentie van der Merwe’s works explore the association that camouflage has with violence in the landscape. In Burger’s works there is a focus on the battlefields of Southern Africa as sites of historical trauma. Her works evoke a search for illusive traces of a traumatic past in these landscapes, in the furtive hope of coming to an understanding, resolution, and closure.

Van der Merwe, on the other hand explores, in his series of works entitled 'Trophy Cam', photography’s role in contemporary game-hunting technology. In doing so the works evoke the tensions that for the artist lie hidden in the landscape and signify his own heritage as a white male and Afrikaans-speaking person growing up on a Namibian farm during the 1980’s.