I was fortunate enough to have been one of the participating artists selected for the inaugural 2018 Tankwa Artscape which was held in the Tankwa Karoo (South Africa). There is no clear meaning for the word Tankwa but it is generally understood to be 'turbid water', 'place of the San' or 'thirst land.' I will go for 'Place of the San' as it the place where the nomadic Bushmen lived more than 10 000 years ago. It is a place where I wanted to pay my respect to the San through my artwork.
For Tankwa Artscape I created a sound-drawing made from loam soil which I collected from the Tankwa river bed. I ground the soil with a mortar & pestle over a period of two days whilst intermittently capturing the local and environmental soundscape. With this in hand, I commenced my sound-drawing on the floor of a large, abandoned water reservoir on Stonehenge Farm, taking two days to complete.
The innermost section of Architecture of Sound (2018) reflects the bird songs I captured whilst hiding in Kim Goodwin's The /Xam Temple (2016), the only place where birds seem to come together. Adjacent to the bird songs was that of the Didgeridoo and mouth harp both played by collaborating artist Quentin Dibley Green. The outer edges reflect the ever-present sounds of the wind.
The title refers to both the excavation of soil as medium as well as the 'unearthing' of the line work with a Japanese brush.
Architecture of Sound (2018) photo credit: Bronwyn Trupp