At the heart of Kate Gottgens’ latest body of work
lies a sense of entrapment; a quiet dissonance that emerges in the use of
evocative imagery, painted in ash.
Gottgens started photographing the contents of a
props warehouse in Voortrekker Road – that grim, grey, modernist trash-can
of a road that runs through some of the bleakest mid-century suburbs of
Cape Town.
‘The warehouse stored a surreal assortment of
objects – blankets, horns, mannequins, books, radios – a melancholic
coming-to-rest of the discarded and forlorn that drew me into the space.’
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At the time, Gottgens was reading The Drowned and
the Saved, Primo Levi’s book about Auschwitz, in which he writes of a
‘grey zone’, an ethical no-man’s land where the border between guilt and
innocence is examined. The ideas and the imagery led Gottgens to a theme
of entrapment: physical and psychological; to explore the dynamic
between, accused and accuser, victim and perpetrator, prisoner and jailer.
In the translation from in situ reality to the
camera, and from camera to canvas, there is a natural process of
abstraction. Gottgens thus creates a powerful dissociation of shapes and
marks from the things originally represented. Although there are
recognizable elements in the paintings – faces, bodies, animals, buildings
– these are vehicles symbolizing a deeper, internal struggle, depicted in
the grey ash that provides the matrix out of which these painterly
diagrams arise. Subjects distort, ambiguities shift and a sense of unease
is manifested. The ash evokes a realm between worlds, a liminal universe
of dreams and nightmares.
Asleep Inside You is Gottgens’ title for this body
of work. And this is key, for it conveys the fertility that exists even in
the face of collapse; that life coiled up and seemingly trapped is simply
a position that carries the potential for rebirth.
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"Asleep
Inside You" by Kate Gottgens