Page 11 - Art First: Joni Brenner: At the Still Point

Nirox Sculpture Park 2014

dense works on paper, part of the Skull series. These watercol- past, imagined by those underground astronauts from the evidence
ours, part of Brenner’s ongoing daily practice and study, never that they sifted from the cavern’s muddy floor, and a different fu-
cease to surprise – evidence of the fact that one comes to the ture – how will this consciousness gleaned from stone/bone affect
practice a new person each time. The works are somehow sur- our view of ourselves and the other sentient beings on this planet?
prisingly inchoate but also individuated, both in the process of Brenner has long thought and spoken of a companion to Life of
being and becoming. Bone, an exhibition and book she produced in 2011 with a group
The week of thinking and writing about these works of Brenner’s of artists and scientists, writers, geneticists and medical doctors
has also been the week in which the Homo naledi finds have that explored the significance of bones, both human and fossil-
been shared with the world. The discovery of 15 or more (semi) ised, with the small Taung hominin skull at the centre of the study.
fossilised skeletons in a dark and almost unreachable cavern in the At the time, they considered a sequel to the project which was
Cradle of Humankind – one which never seems to have had easy tentatively imagined as Life of Stone, a project that would continue
access to the outside – has suggested that these very early homi- the art-meets-science exploration of place and deep time through
nins may well have carried or dragged their dead into these in- the consideration of other, perhaps older fossils, and what they
nermost recesses to protect the bodies from scavenging creatures. have to share. In her own studio practice, which has long had the
Such behaviour, if it can indeed be inferred from the collection of cyclical nature of life and death and the attendant consideration
bones which seem to have been laid there over a period of time of time passing as a focus in her studies of portraits and of skulls,
several million years ago, would suggest that these early beings perhaps the perturbations caused by Home naledi will serve as
displayed both insight and foresight, as well as emotional connec- a new unsettlement for Brenner who has, perfectly unobtrusively,
tions that drove the living so to protect their dead. ‘the universe in her mind and hands’, as Da Vinci once explained
The moment in which I write is a rich concatenation of a new about the work that painters do.

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