PRESS RELEASE
PENELOPE STUTTERHEIME: Weaving
Apr 9 – Apr 26, 2025
Weaving, a solo exhibition by Penelope Stutterheime.
Opening reception: Wednesday 9th April - 6pm
This collection of work, Weaving, captures the essence of Stutterheime’s long-standing preoccupation with depicting inner landscapes. Drawing inspiration from dreams and the unconscious, her layered and textured paintings use impasto and a masterful facility with colour to create her ethereal, abstract works. Her paintings are a portrayal of her own inner spiritual processes, while also interrogating universal consciousness.
Stutterheime explains:
The work reveals a slow unfolding, and a weaving together of states of being. Daniel C. Wahl wrote that “weavers are healers of the unbroken whole – connecting people and place in elegant tapestries of shared meaning and visions of a world that works for all.” My practice engages actively with layering the literal passage of time and formal artistic considerations onto one symbolic surface. The choice of colours represents my own mindscape; in turn I hope to reflect on larger considerations, offering a reconnection and weaving together of humanity’s mindfulness and beyond.
The artist responds intuitively to her surroundings and events in her life, seeking to convey a state of mind rather than any particular reality. She describes pouring herself, her emotions and feelings, through rather than into a work. The process is deeply cathartic, with the act of repeatedly applying oil paint to the canvas serving as a meditative process for subconsciously working through emotions. Conveyed through hue and form, the images are a representation of transformation.
Stutterheime’s is an organic practice, steeped in the desire to both control and simultaneously release. Edges and boundaries ebb and flow on the canvas through both intuitive responses and painstaking application of layers. On the one hand, Stutterheime finds herself letting go of “preconceived thoughts of what must happen” and thus takes “a risk for a conclusion”. But equally, there is an active pushing by the artist of the materiality of the oil paint, “forcing and continuing, until something emerges”.
For Stutterheime, the dance between colour and shape is ultimately a desire to find “resolution of form and sensation”. Referring to the experiential quality of the paintings, Stutterheime’s intention is to lead herself and the viewer to the possibility of consciously moving through different states and into the present moment.
Stutterheime developed her intense love for landscape as a child growing up on the edge of Newlands Forest in Cape Town. She studied part-time with the artist Simon Stone and the late Bill Ainslie, one of South Africa’s finest abstractionists, but aside from this is largely self-taught. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions consistently over the past thirty years, and her paintings are included in private and corporate collections around the world. She is based in Cape Town.
