George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts – poet, historian,
ethnographer, artist, cartographer and prolific writer. A geologist by
profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the
extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the
South African interior. Enchanted and absorbed by them, Stow set out to
create a record of this creative work of the people who had tracked and
marked the South African landscape decades and centuries before him.
This exhibition reveals the scope and the beauty of his labours.
Stow’s paintings are more than just copies of what he found on the rocks.
They are interpretations of the art of the San, informed by his own
understanding of a particularly turbulent time in South African history
and his sense of the tragic demise of the San way of life. This exhibition
celebrates his pioneering achievement and reminds us, too, of the richness
of the imaginative universe of the San.
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The exhibition of the work of the industrious (but little known) Stow
includes a collection of his interpretations of rock art, a selection of
his geological maps, documents and field notebooks. Also on display are
some of his poetic works, quotations from his writings on the San and
their history as he recorded and interpreted it, as well as some
contextual material from the Bleek and Lloyd archive.
The exhibition runs until the middle of February 2009 and brings
together works from the South African Museum, the McGregor Museum, the
National Library of South Africa and the University of Cape Town (UCT). It
is curated by Pippa Skotnes and her team at the Centre for Curating the
Archive, Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT. A new publication by Pippa
Skotnes , Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the
San, will be launched at the opening of the exhibition.
George Stow was a man enchanted by the majesty of the natural world.
He was compelled to explore. He was delighted by the splendour of
mountains, the vastness of the landscape, the beauty and perfection of
plant and animal life. He believed in the catastrophic origins of the
hills and valleys, in a primeval deluge that shaped the surface of the
earth. He was moved to great religious feeling, he was a poet, an
historian, a medical man, a geologist, a map-maker, an oral historian and
prolific writer, and he laboured to create a record of the creative work
of the people who tracked and marked the landscape he so loved decades and
centuries before him.
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Unconquerable
Spirit: George Stow and the Rock Art of the San