Adele Van Heerden continues to dedicate herself to the interplay between light, water and natural life, as she celebrates the freedom that comes with a healing body and the ceremonial act of swimming.
Van Heerden’s adventurousness is rewarded with the sensations that accompany the disintegration of the real and imagined boundaries between human and waterbodies. Audiences join Van Heerden by the riverbed, where rushing water flushes the river’s veins and Alluvial matter sets the scene for the artist’s latest solo exhibition. Here, there are rich soils, an earthier palette, and an investigation into a river’s teachings on time.
The channel of water carries and collects the fertile sediment, that feeds the aquatic environment’s soil. These minerals have an effect not just on the colour of the water, but its inhabitants, too, and these varying combinations mark moments in time to the observer. Van Heerden is expanding her palette as she learns the languages of new waterways, enjoying being in the presence of the power of a river. “I feel like more of myself, and more myself. It’s a simple feeling of fullness, plentitude and satisfaction. It’s pure, intense and honest. The feeling of being alive and experiencing one’s own presence in harmony with the world,” she explains.
Moving away from urbanised environments that engage with bodies of water on the city’s coastlines, the artist’s focus has moved towards a metaphorical space rather than a specific, physical location. Turning her gaze onto rivers and their symbolic and subconscious provocations, Van Heerden finds new moments of connection to encapsulate as she traverses the Cederberg mountains, where ancient formations rest 200 kilometres outside of Cape Town. In Alluvial, a growing cast of bodies join the artist in the multitoned waters. Fish, Frogs and Waterbirds. The Clanwilliam Yellowfish joins the list of the artist’s rare subjects, the story of the creature’s resilience having great significance for the artist as it mirrors her own journey of physical healing. In the Olifants-Doring waters, the Clanwilliam Yellowfish’s habitat was restored and following their rehabilitation and reintroduction, there is now a thriving school of fish years after the intervention. The artist is able to bear witness as she is now able to partake in hiking once again, a beloved pastime.
Always attuned to the surface of the water, Van Heerden’s abstractive approach to boundaries and bodies would liken this barrier to the river’s own skin.
The artist’s creative practice is discretely defined by an amorphous understanding of the ‘waterbody’. There, with the dazzle of specular reflection’s dancing, the artist reconsiders the distinctions made between internal and external landscapes with pastel, gouache and aerosol on her preferred canvas of architectural film paper. Each series of artworks brings Van Heerden closer not only to herself, but to a greater and deeper sense of knowing that recalibrates her perspective. What can seem as simple as a ‘trick of light’, can in fact lead one, through curiosity and witness, to profound revelations.
