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Photographs from the edge -
Photographs from the edge -
Photographs from the edge
WORDS Debbie Loots
Artist Lien Botha’s amazing way of turning bleak everyday scenes into a wonder wasteland of peculiar beauty is evident all over her new show of photographs, Yonder, opening at the Barnard Gallery in Cape Town on Thursday 20 March at 6pm, and showing until 1 May 2014.
Yonder tells a visual tale of apocalyptic desolation, set in an African context and subtly marked as such through digital camera coordinates. Lien explains, “Coordinates are now part of the work. The exact geographical location and degrees of where every photograph was taken, those coordinates, are sandblasted on the glass at the bottom left of every artwork. I think it’s the first time that a local photographer uses this technique.”
A Michaelis graduate, commercial photographer and also Creative Writing Masters student at UCT, Lien was at first unsettled about the fluidity of the digital medium. But, after having worked with it for five years, she understands it better.
Just like her previous exhibition, Parrot Jungle, Yonder brims with stories of landscape and ecology. “It’s a map that’s still inherent,” says Lien when comparing it with Yonder, which she thinks, just like Parrot Jungle, tells a simple story, but shows a new experimentation with strangeness.
Telling tales of the loss of carefree times and an innocence of a long time ago, Yonder’s poignant pictures include an abandoned swimming pool in the Tankwa-Karoo, a derelict playground horse in Beaufort West and, in the Kalahari, live ducks roosting in the sand alongside a white swan flower planter.
Yonder, Lien’s 10th solo exhibition in a career spanning 30 years is really made up of close-to-the-heart-stuff.
Lien is one of VISI’s favourite and most-prolific photographers. Click here to see some of the stories she’s shot for us.
