IN HIS EXQUISITE 2008 tractate on death and dying, English writer Julian Barnes comments that just as every writer will have a last reader, so every grave will have a last visitor. South African artist Maria Pienaar takes this profound reflection a step further, contemplating the last viewer of old family photographs, in her haunting exhibition Briewe aan Ma (Letters to Mother) on show at Gallery Chaton, SA Association of the Arts in Pretoria, until 11 May 2024.

Along the poignant yet never trite lines cast by SA artist Karin Preller in her career-long body of work engaging with the depths in ostensibly quick and flippant family snaps, Pienaar’s work tells stories that are specific to her people. It’s about an elderly woman with arthritic hands, as it is about a young woman with a growing family. It is about school group photographs and absences, as it is about portraits of siblings from decades ago. We don’t know the details, but we don’t need to. Pienaar’s is a foray into the universality of family, the essence of memories which we hold close to our hearts for so long and with such care until they (or we) no longer exist in the material world.

The edge of these works, which lends them the kind of teeth that avert the prettiness or smoothness of fraying memories is the threads. Largely, Pienaar works with sewing-machine-driven thread on fabric, in these pieces, which are small in physical size and exhibited collectively in a tiny space, but they are massive in the abyss of love and loss and letting go that they describe here. The ends of Pienaar’s threads are not neatly or seamlessly worked into the fabric, apologizing for their disruption of the surface. Rather they are bold and messy, like SA artist Gina Waldman’s exhibition Mesh a few years ago, bearing the messy underside of weave, they show their brokenness and they disrupt the legibility of the images themselves, in a way that speaks of their own fragility as simple black cotton on a piece of cloth.

It’s an astounding exhibition which draws you in to Pienaar’s mother’s life as it casts you asunder in the broken dreams and forgotten memories of your own people who you may have lost or whose graves you may have stopped visiting because life has pulled you in different directions.

Pienaar’s work is ‘slow art’ in the face of the rough and tumble of conceptual energies and art that casts fists of anger and technology into contemporary galleries. It is made with old-fashioned technique and skill, but thinking that remains sharp and bright and hard-hitting. It’s a show you cannot afford to miss.

• Briewe aan Ma by Maria Pienaar at Gallery Chaton, SA Arts Association, Mackie Street, Bailey’s Muckleneuk in Pretoria until 11 May 2024. Call 012 346 3100.