Io Makandal - FRONDESCENT

07.10.19 – 27.10.23
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Throughout the making of this body of work, which I did during a recent residency at the Nirox Foundation, I was thinking about fallowing - a concept that came out of numerous conversations with fellow artist Meghan Judge, about a time and space of recovery and all the interrelated relations that grow from there. It seems that in both human time and nature time we need a different kind of pace of time to repair.

Contemporary homogenised Western culture and society does not always recognise this nuanced pace of time and pushes for a hyper-accelerated pace of production and continuous development. I find myself at a place of Frondescence after a time of fallowing, in a gradual unfolding into becoming foliage. A new leaf emerges. This body of work is an emerging into, out of, a becoming with and into being while embracing the complex relations to the conditioning of nature.

I find other F-words: Folly, Fodder, Flourish, Fertile, Ferment, Foliage, Feral, Fecund, Forage, Ferdant, Fractured, Flaccid, Folding and so on, that describe both my embodied experience of transformation after a time of fallowing as well as the ever present ecological conversations with Terra.

-Text by Io Makandal