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ART EXHIBIT
"Blight" by Marlise Keith
Venue: iArt Gallery Wembley, Wembley Square, Gardens, Cape
Town. Tel: (021) 424 5150.
Gallery Hours: -
Duration: 1 - 25 Sep 2010
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In her latest body of work Keith explores the ways in which
we use and live with “nourishing” metaphors. The term “blight” refers to
the discolouring and eventual death of plants as a result of incapacity to
produce sufficient chlorophyll. The disease is most commonly associated
with potatoes and was responsible for the Great Irish
Famine in the mid 1800s. In this exhibition, Keith draws on her encounters
with people and food, or, more specifically, people who eat food, or
don’t, or can’t.
On the one hand, food can be a metaphor for health,
prosperity, even luxury. However, on the other hand, as is pointed out in
the extract from Lee Allen’s thoughts on potatoes, the metaphor of food
can have equally damaging connotations.
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Keith recalls a girl she once taught who was slowly starving
herself. She had tried at some point to explain to the obsessive,
gum-chewing child that chewing is not the same as eating. In Keith’s
memory of this encounter, the backdrop is Kevin Carter’s famous photograph
from the early 1990s in which a vulture seems to stalk a starving child in
the southern Sudanese hamlet of Ayod. In the context of this girl, the
choices that we make is something that Keith often thinks of when enjoying
an exquisite meal with her friends, or pondering the ritualistic process
of cooking a meal, the pride of sharing a well-loved recipe and the way
that writing about food seems to engage all the senses.
Through this recollection, Keith’s thoughts on food become a
metaphor for how easily we judge, slur or deliver sentence – not only on
other people, but also on ourselves. As the artist puts it: “It is like
having the right shoes to run a marathon, but also the chainsaw to off our
own legs, at our own discretion and in our own time, and we do.”
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