A freelance arts writer since 1998, I fell in love with the theatre as a toddler, proved rubbish as a ballerina: my starring role was as Mrs Pussy in Noddy as a seven-year-old, and earned my stripes as an academic in Fine Arts and Art History, in subsequent years. I write for a range of online and print publications, including the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and artslink.co.za and was formerly the arts editor of the SA Jewish Report, a weekly newspaper with which I was associated for 16 years. I am currently a Research Associate at Wits University. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
FRANCE IN THE 18th century, boasted, among other things, a Rococo thinking that cast a light-hearted hue at almost everything. The artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of the painters of the era, popular for his saccharine images that teetered on the sexually taboo, with young girls mourning small […]
DON’T BE PUT off by Craig Smith’s characteristic light touch on his raw canvases in It’s Irrelevant, a solo exhibition of new works mounted at Galleri Kalashnikovv in Braamfontein. Similar to the thinking of American artist Cy Twombly, Smith negotiates space, gesture and chance in a way that […]
EVEN BEFORE YOU enter the space of Toni-Ann Ballenden’s show City of Gold: Cash for Scrap, in Gallery 2, you’re beset with a sense of playfulness that underpins an earnest idea of a plotted cityscape. There is an installation called Folly in the gallery’s window that speaks of […]
In 1943, a curious little book of stories about animals was published. Little Veld Folk was penned by one Cecil J. Shirley, it was aimed at a child readership, but its intense pen and ink drawings, particularly one about a bird who was vain, offers an edgy glance […]
THE ARCHITECTURAL DRAMA of the ramp and the entrance point to Circa gallery sets the tone for In/Dependence, a solo exhibition by Robert Slingsby, and the energy and force is carried through in a dramatic, intense installation, but there are elements of excess in the presentation and articulated […]
PLEASE BE WARNED: STROBE LIGHTS ARE USED IN THIS PRODUCTION! WHEN YOU ENTER the sacred confines of a new work which you’ve yet to experience and the front of house staff issue you with ear plugs along with your tickets, be afraid, be very afraid. Flemish choreographer Jan […]
THE FACT OF death always belies what you may anticipate when you think of losing a loved one. One year after the untimely passing of David Brown, an extraordinary testament to the love of his family and his energy and focus, by way of an exhibition entitled Zoo […]
AS YOU ENTER the architecturally sacrosanct-seeming space of the upstairs level of the Standard Bank Gallery, Dumile Feni’s Guernica hits you in the solar plexus. It’s like a series of overwhelming chords in a familiar requiem. Hung in the back of the space, this magnificent drawing in ink […]
PLEASE BE WARNED: STROBE LIGHTS ARE USED IN THIS PRODUCTION! TAKE A LOOK at the world around you. Every inch of everything you glance at is striving for your attention, be it in the form of social media or marketing or beggars in the street, touting their misery. […]
TAKE A HANDFUL of western fairy tales. Inject into them a goodly measure of Jungian myth-making, and Rudolf Steiner thinking, spiced with some pop psychology, tight Broadway sequences, a dollop of cynicism, some good rhythmic writing and not a little tongue in cheek-ness and you get a rollicking […]
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