DIANA VIVES: The Fire in the Mind

Everard Read Cape Town is pleased to present The Fire in the Mind, a solo exhibition by Diana Vives.

Opening reception: Tuesday 15th October - 6pm

Walkabout: Saturday 26th September - 11am

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The Fire in the Mind

Over the last two years, fire has been the theme of my Master’s in sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, which resulted in this body of work.

My project set out to make fire ‘strange’ again. I have chased it through time, across physical and psychic landscapes. I have considered the spark of the imagination, and the contagion between inner and outer fires, through the skin of things and the porous boundaries in a world of entangled matter.

Fire, ever since it was first harnessed, has played a pivotal role in shaping human cognition and desire and, consequently, in reshaping the Earth. My creative process brings fire into focus through a lens that is sympathetic to new materialism, botanical paradigms and neo-animism.

The materials with which I have worked were all mediated by fire and are freighted with metaphor. Some, like igneous rock, originate from fire. Others, like clay or metal, are shaped by it. Wood, however, is central to my material concerns. Trees and timber scorched in wildfires feature in my work to symbolise human flesh, or the roots of individuals and collectives - bringing with them their own complex histories of climate, displacement and exploitation.

I have borrowed from the metalanguage of myth and ancient belief systems to negotiate ideas of conscious and unconscious, memory and imagination, nature and culture, past and present. Fire reminds that all streams of knowledge originate from a similar source, and that meaning is attached to form. As early humans encountered the elemental forces of the natural world, they interpreted and harnessed matter in order to survive and compete - and through the gift of consciousness and language, to understand and express our purpose and potential, individually and as a species.

At its heart, this is an existential project. Fire is not a thing, nor an element, but a process of transformation. My own being has felt the breath of fire that both regenerates and consumes, illuminates and blinds. I live in a time of planetary inflammations of both ecology and mental health. Yet while the outer fires can be visually apprehended and addressed for all, there will be no universal resolution without tending the inner ones, invisible, and for each alone.

Installation images by Michael Hall