FECUND: A GARDEN OF EARTHY DELIGHT

Everard Read presents Fecund: A Garden of Earthy Delight, by Josie Grindrod and Jann Cheifitz. Curated by Clare van Zyl.

9 - 26 July 2025

Exhibition opening: 6pm Wednesday 9th July

Walkabout: 11am Saturday 26th July

Fecund is a mixed media show of works created by Jann Cheifitz and Josie Grindrod. The show explores cycles of fecundity and fertility, fallow times and death, and the layered meanings of abundance. Claiming fecundity as a complex space of power and transformation, the exhibition looks at the fertile ground between the body, the garden and imagination.

REQUEST A PORTFOLIO

Exhibition text by Keely Shinners

The Empress. She is situated between a forest and a wheat field, splayed across a throne of pillows in a pomegranate dress. In her hand is a sceptre. On her head is a crown of stars. It is her image, her archetype, that comes to mind when I consider the works by Josephine Grindrod and Jann Cheifitz gathered in Fecund, curated by Clare van Zyl. Indeed, A. E. Waite, who is widely considered to have written the most influential text on modern tarot interpretation, describes the Empress thus: “she is above all things universal fecundity … the repository of all things nurturing and sustaining.” She is often considered a mother, loosely defined as she who gives life – she who reigns over the cycles of birth, death and rebirth that govern life. The etymology of fecund reinforces this loose definition of what it means to give life, sharing, as it does, a Latin root with felare "to suck;" femina "woman" (literally "she who suckles"); felix "fortunate;" fetus "offspring;" and fenum "hay."

For Grindrod and Cheifitz – both artists in their sixties, who studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town around the same time and have been practicing artists ever since – the question of what it means to be fecund when one has passed the so-called reproductive stage is a rich one. Over the past eighteen months and across two continents – Grindrod in her studio in Salt River, Cheifitz working from a barn in upstate New York – these two artists, who brought Van Zyl into the fold eighteen months ago, have birthed this exhibition in conversation with one another. As curator, Van Zyl has shaped the show from the beginning; studio visits, Zoom calls, photo exchanges, as well as ample discussions about age, body, femininity, and creativity have been a vital part of the making process, contributing to a whole new generation of work that speaks to the “gestalt of the show”, as Grindrod puts it.

In this vein, the garden is a metaphor to which the three, gardeners themselves, often return. For all its beauty, a garden requires patience, requires labour, requires surrender to decay and regeneration. In Pushing Up Daisies, for instance, Cheifitz’s tapestry interweaves psychedelic rainbows and daisies with skulls and crossbones – memento mori. Similarly, Grindrod’s pastel Carrots II shows the titular vegetable rendered in such a way that it could easily be mistaken for carrion. The garden as both produce and compost. Bloom and muck. 

Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights has served as a major inspiration for the exhibition, particularly the painting’s first panel, which depicts Adam and Eve in Paradise. Eve and the Snake who tempts her to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil recur across both artists’ works, particularly in Cheifitz’s serpentine ceramic plates and Grindrod’s Forbidden Fruit series. In the former, the Snake is rendered playfully – its eyes cartoonish, its tongue split and spry. In the latter, Eve approaches the Snake curiously, a bit coquettishly, then crosses over it, as if crossing a threshold. The fact that, for both artists, the Snake is not a fearful symbol redeems Eve in a sense. She is not the archetype of feminine transgression with which she has been associated for centuries; rather, she is a reverential figure, ushering us into the unknown, piercing the veneer of innocence to reveal a mortal world of desire and consequence.

Christian theology too often associates the expulsion of Eden with shame – and, accordingly, condemns Eve for the grief begotten. She is the culprit for the original shame that distinguishes humans from other animals – shame of nakedness. Grindrod captures this in MA Era Work V, a mixed media work that sees a faceless figure cupping their hand over their genitals, the lefthand side of their body darkened with the shame of the taboo. Moreover, Eve is said to be the reason why mothers experience excruciating pain in childbirth – thus symbolically linking the biological facts of her with an air of moral repugnance. Grindrod and Cheifitz subvert this by unabashedly making use of yonic imagery in their work. In an untitled work, Grindrod depicts a vulva as a soldier of sorts, complete with helmet and staff, haloed in bloodish red. This work was referenced in an amulet that Van Zyl made in collaboration with jewellery artist Verna Jooste. In Cheifitz’s work Her Story, labia unfold from ferns, and wombs gleam pink and orange alongside the garden’s flowers.

For the latter, who grew up as the daughter of a gynaecologist, this type of imagery was ever-present in her family home and, to a certain extent, normalised. Feminist artists from the sexual revolution onwards – such as Judy Chicago and Niki de Saint Phalle, major sources of inspiration for Cheifitz – have paved the way in terms of inserting yonic imagery into the artistic canon. Viewers may, still, feel a reflexive perturbance to encounter such organs with which we are both acutely familiar and painfully ignorant.

To couple these with floral imagery is to engage in a centuries-long association of the garden with the mysteries of sexuality and procreation. Just look at various euphemisms used commonly in the English language. To lose one’s virginity is to be deflowered. To ejaculate is to spill seed. For the Ancient Greeks, the growth cycle of germination, growth, harvest and death is attributed to a myth of a woman’s subjugation: Hades’ abduction of Persephone. Grindrod has depicted Persephone in several works. In Imogen as Persephone she is nude, bruised by red and purple marks; the green stem of some as-yet-unknown plant grows out of her palms. That she is a figure who holds two roles – to be, at once, Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Underworld – is a fact that she seems to hold with quiet dignity, knowing that there is fecundity in both the tangible world of the garden’s growth and the psychic world of death and dreams.

Beyond these symbolic associations – Eve, Persephone – the material history of women’s relationship to the garden is probably worth noting here. In Medieval Europe, for instance, gardens were more often than not the purview of women, where they grew food as well as medicinal herbs. To reclaim the garden is to reclaim these knowledge systems, to reclaim, to borrow Grindrod’s words, “the intelligences and capacities that have been historically reviled”. To do so means “staking claim in terms of experience”. She describes the artistic practice at this stage of her career as one of “synthesis”, feeding on one’s antecedents to produce imagery that is layered with meaning, multifarious, complex. Cheifitz similarly articulates a fondness for a garden that is wild and free, rather than productive and pruned, as a metaphor for the creative process, an intuitive way of working whereby “one thing leads to another”, which is “really where the feeling lies”. Both artists are guided by the garden’s impulse to make again and again – a “desperation, a despair to do”, as Grindrod puts it. This impulse results in bodies of work that are, much like a garden, “a source of amazement, joy, disbelief, and magic”, to borrow Cheifitz’s words.

Stepping into the exhibition, one feels one has stepped into a garden-of-sorts. Cheifitz’s soft plush sculptures of fruits, roots and garlic heads lay playfully strewn about the space, while her butterfly-wing-cum-vulva Portal hangs in a doorway. “There are layers of presentation from when you enter the gallery space through every wall, layers of texture,” notes Van Zyl. “The way that we are treating the space is going to affect the reception of the works.” Over the exhibition’s two-week run, Van Zyl will add, rearrange and reshape the works, amounting to a presentation that is not so much immersive as it is mutable – a metamorphosing thing. So too is the fate of Fecund, which will evolve over time, beyond the exhibition, as these three women continue to explore what has been, thus far, a generative process of collaboration and exchange.

Josephine Grindrod was born in Durban in 1963. She now lives in Cape Town. Situating her painting practice as an embodied, critical and generative response to found narratives, objects and images, Grindrod is interested in the imaginal as a realm allowing both personal and social transformation.

Based currently in New York, Jann Cheifitz was born in Cape Town in 1964. Cheifitz has spent the past few years creating a new body of work combining screen-printing, ceramics, painting and embroidery. Started during and inspired by the Covid lockdown, as the global social fabric seemed to unravel, she began stitching together loose threads of personal iconography into fantastical security blankets to ward against despair and to offer hope, inspiration, color, comfort, solidarity and security.  

Curator Clare van Zyl was born in 1964 in the Boland, South Africa, and is currently based in Cape Town. Van Zyl holds a BA from the University of Cape Town, majoring in History of Art. Graduating in the late 1980s influenced her approach to artists’ commentary and perspectives. After working through the 1990s in news and documentary filmmaking, Van Zyl started a commercial film company in 2000, producing work throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In 2004, she co-produced the feature film ‘Boy Called Twist’, which represented South Africa in Cannes the following year. In the last ten years, Van Zyl has collaborated with local artists to produce art film installation works. These include Brett Murray’s ‘Triumph’ (South African Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017, now in the permanent collection of the Apartheid Museum) and Mohau Modisakeng’s ‘Passage’ (Venice Biennale 2019). A long-standing creative dialogue with Sue Williamson has resulted in three film series, exhibited in the USA, Europe and Australia, as well as in South Africa at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.