I present my solo exhibition titled The Theatre of The Yellow Rock Fort.

Shadows are mind bending, flexible and unrestricted by the confines of the human form. They stretch and elongate and turn corners where the host body cannot reach. A shadow can start as a human and morph into something four legged or maybe five, or a single cell amoeba with finger like projections.

I return to a place I call The Yellow Rock Fort, situated in the zone of rock and sand between the South Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Peninsula. Here plover nests are built, and chicks are valiantly protected. Blombos holds the shifting shore, and spring daisies blanket the ground. The effort of living and nurturing is temporarily put on hold when the seas are big, bringing heavy waters rolling into and over the rocks and sand and nests and green shoots, so that the green shoots lie flat against the sand and plover chicks are lost. With this surge, kelp is uprooted; long stems dumped into the space in tangled clumps of arms and legs. At first slippery and wet and then hard and brittle as they dry. Then once again the green shoots raise their heads, and the plovers remake their nests. This is a space of tension between harsh reality and tenacious life. And into this space a shadow comes to play.

I have used this real place as a setting for an imaginary theatre where the shadow takes a leading role in a performative presentation of narrative and ritual. The shadow is mine; it draws on the marks etched into the surfaces of the rock and the unvoiced thoughts of the self, the dark parts that come with the light.

Opening on Thursday 6 August at 5pm | Association for Visual Arts Gallery, 35 Church Street, Cape Town

View The Theatre of The Yellow Rock Fort Exhibition Catalogue here.