Cathy Abraham: A Shifted Season
Cathy Abraham: A Shifted Season
Beginning, as I so often do, with a question: How does humanity’s shadowed past shape the unfolding present? My practice, which has long considered the haunting of trauma in individual lives, finds a resonating subject in the shifting seasonal cycles that have come to characterise the Anthropocene. My reflections on this theme draw on a single phrase from Jacques Derrida: “The future belongs to ghosts.” Our collective histories, the consequences of our being and doing, the harm we have metered out against the Earth and one another, all these accumulated actions and traumas necessarily haunt our shared future.
In pursuing an answer to my question, I came across environmental activist David Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance (1997) and his lyrical observations on argon gas. The physical fact of argon and its metaphoric weight have offered me an unanticipated hope. This noble gas reveals how we, as human beings, are connected not only to one another – as to animals, plants, and stars – but also to cosmic deep time. As Suzuki writes: “If I am air and you are air, then I am you.” How succinctly the distance of difference between self and other is collapsed by argon, which joins past, present and future into a single entity.
That the argon atom is composed of 18 protons is of particular significance to my practice. Much of my work takes gematria, the mystical alphanumeric system within Kabbalah, as its starting point, and 18 – which symbolises life – lends a recurring structure to my paintings. Inhaled and exhaled unchanged across time, argon expands the conceptual breadth of my counting, ‘breathing life’ into that which is endangered and broken, fading or lost.
On my canvas, repetition becomes a synonym for meditation; each mark made a syllable in a silent prayer. These prayers address personal sufferings that continue to haunt me, those shadows which find expression in the overlapping ‘ghosts’ of colliding brushmarks. Reappraised with argon as a metaphor, the paintings extend beyond the individual self to the great entanglement of life, its shared histories and hauntings. Similarly, in my scale drawings, I now recognise an allegory of changing ecologies; each composition shaped by causality, each pen destined to run out of ink.
A new series of sculptures quote the haunting forms that appear in my brushwork paintings, lending material substance to the unseen and unacknowledged. Composed of planes that converge and diverge, they resist the clarity of a unified edge. Instead – outcrops and overhangs, the solidity of rock formations; no longer spectral but stone, appearing at once mineral and human. Together, these sculptures stand as quiet monuments to those who have long recognised the role of our collective ghosts in the ecological precarity of the present.
More about the artist Cathy Abraham:
In her ritual-based practice, Cathy Abraham (b.1968, South Africa) brings together seemingly disparate preoccupations through methodologies of participation and process. She works systematically with repetitive gestures as a way of thinking through the patterns that mark our daily existence, articulating her considerations in variable mediums including performance, sculpture, participatory gestures, film, drawing and painting.
The highly developed surfaces of her painted works consider boundaries between interior selves and the exterior currents that shape them. Each painting is composed by brushstrokes counted and numbered, and becomes, in its making, at once a meditation and quiet revelation. To those places her repeated brushstrokes meet, Cathy lends the designation of ‘ghost’. A metaphor for the spectre of trauma and its haunting of memory, these ‘ghosts’ are central to her enquiry into spiritual and formal understandings of the self in time, and the collapsing of past, present and future.
Cathy has held several solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous group exhibitions. In 2018, Cathy’s MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, culminated in a solo exhibition, titled A Deeper Kind of Nothing. She was awarded her degree with distinction.