Louisemarié Combrink

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Louisemarié Combrink was born in 1971 and completed her BA (Languages) and BA (Honours - Art History) as well as her MA (English and Art History) at the Potchefstroom University (currently the North-West University). She also studied painting and graphic design parallel to the aforementioned qualifications. She has taught at the Vaal Triangle Technikon (currently the Vaal University of Technology) as well as The Open Window School of Visual Communication, and currently lectures at the North-West University. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has curated a number of national exhibitions. Her current interest is with practice-based research projects at the North-West University. She works in media such as painting, installation and photography and often explores the possibilities of osmosis between creative and academic disciplines and between visual and literary art.

PROJECT

Title Hidden narratives (name of series)
Individual works:
1. Bloedblomme
2. Different ways of dying
3. An absence can keep you alive
4. Language surrenders
5. Opacities
6. Die onvertaalbares / Accidentally burnt as rubbish
Medium Perspex, books, enamel paint
Dimensions 6 objects, each 22 x 25 x 12 cm
Edition 1
Price R 1 800-00 each, R8 800 for the series

Anne Michaels, in her novel Fugitive pieces, says “there’s a heavy black outline around things separated from their names” – with reference to a refugee and poet/translator’s pursuit of meaning in a new language.

Because we read books and live through what we read, sometimes in various languages, we experience books as things that can be opened, read, unlocked. The unthinkable: not being able to read or open a book. “Hidden narratives” explores a perspective on the book when the obvious reading is not possible – the book becomes an artefact that should be regarded in strange terms: as an object with body language, subjective associations and veiled meanings. The ritual of opening and turning pages, of time that passes and flows with reading, now becomes a moment and a narrative frozen in time: a longing. This first impulse of turning pages is frustrated: access is impossible because of the enclosed space of the book where only vague reflections suggest further levels of reading. . “Hidden narratives” plays with the notions of the language of presence and absence, linguistic leaps and intranslatability, and the moment when language surrenders to find new meanings.