JENNY PARSONS Island Apertures
Island Apertures: a poetic, painterly view of small islands of land, with some thoughts on natural history. The Swartland is beautiful. The play of sunshine on its wheat fields is interrupted by small areas of shrubland which absorb light, effecting the shadowy, dark patches which give the area its name. This remnant patchwork of Renosterveld represents the 5% which remains of a vegetation that has disappeared from the landscape. Interposing farmland has left small islands of Renosterveld in the sea of wheat fields, orchards and vineyards. This was the landscape into which Jenny Parsons ventured after moving from Cape Town to Riebeek West in 2015. The fate of such islands is the subject matter of a discipline known as Island Biogeography. It offers its diagnosis with sobering concision: So small are some islands, that their edges—along which they abut on hostile neighbours—imperil their interiors. Insularity, fragmentation, contraction—these presage loss, and the rarity that is ‘rarity unto death.’ 1 Parsons began to read Island Biogeography, a literature describing the ways—both simple and complex—in which the preconditions for extinction are set. 2 Parsons has long been a painter of the urban, the ruderal, the interstitial. She’s worked with spaces stranded by neglect, or just left behind in the matrix. She is a master at dignifying these spaces, and some of her loveliest paintings are of weeds. “It takes time for a landscape to filter into my consciousness”, she says, but even as she explored the Swartland’s bucolic charms she began to ask: what does it mean to paint this 5%, to paint this insularity, this jeopardy? What does it mean to paint islands?
Quammen, D. (1997). The Cry of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an age of extinctions. London: Pimlico.
1
Renosterveld is classified by the IUCN as Critically Endangered. Renosterveld species face a high risk of extinction in the wild.
2
She began with the synoptic, using Google Earth to hover over her new home, and to spy, from above, the patchwork of wheat, olives, grapes, mountains and Renosterveld that surrounded her. Her next step changed her level of resolution. She began to join members of the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers (CREW), a diverse group of lay and professional botanists who visit and survey Renosterveld patches in her area. “I was welcomed” she says, “I went along and ambled, attaching myself to whoever I felt drawn to.” Unbeknown to her, she had stumbled upon a rare group— botany’s foot- soldiers, the dwindling number of practitioners who can identify plants in the field, assess sites for plant richness, and understand their natural history. But interestingly, Parsons recalls: “They allowed me to zoom in with their eyes. I was struck by their great love for the plants, their excitement and delight at identifying rare and endangered wildflowers.” CREW opened her eyes to the Renosterveld’s remarkable biodiversity, and a desire “to imply this richness in my paintings.” As she spent more time in the field, she was struck by how “my need to paint converged with my wish to understand these botanists.” And she saw, too, that in their patient bestowing of attention, the naturalist and the artist are of-a- kind. She pondered the particularity of CREW’s endeavours, confined as they were to their small islands, and the very specific groups of plants which still cling to them. Over and over she returned to the question: “what underlies this parochial passion for plants?” According to the English landscape essayist, Robert Macfarlane3 , the word ‘parochial’ (the adjectival form of parish) has fallen on hard times, having come to connote confinement, the limited and the narrow. In his notes on the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, Macfarlane writes that this was not always so: Kavanagh returned repeatedly to the “connection between the universal and the parochial, and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at- hand.” For Kavanagh the universal
Macfarlane, R. (2005). Where the wild things were. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/30/featuresreviews.guardianreview22 [retrieved: January 2017].
3
was not to be conflated with the general or the vague, but consisted of “fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular.” The parochial is the bedrock of art. Jenny’s Swartland landscapes are keyed, not to extension, but to the silence and the vividness in which life is held. Parsons knows, as did Kavanagh, that “the parish is not a perimeter, but an aperture—a space through which the world can be seen.” Parsons is a landscape painter of long-standing, and her paintings have always offered an occasion for intimacy. In both fynbos and urban portfolios, they invoke tenderness for the stillness, the light. In this light the Renosterveld transcends its edges, its confinement, its fate, its degradation. Jenny Parsons’s art and CREW’s fidelity are perhaps explained in Patrick Kavanagh’s beautiful ode to the parochial: “To know fully even one field……is a lifetime’s experience. A gap in a hedge……a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a person can fully experience.” Mark Mattson. Mark Mattson is a writer, runner and biologist. He lives in Mtunzini, KwaZulu-Natal.
Jenny Parsons is an urban landscape painter, living and working in Riebeek West. Parsons uses paint to describe her responses to the ways in which we inhabit the land. In her practice she seeks a connection with an urban and rural landscape that is under increasing political and ecological pressure. “When painting the landscape, I sense the fragility of the earth, but also hope for the constructive co-existence of people and biodiversity. Painting the land continues to be a way of engaging with the strangeness of being here�. Parsons grew up in KwaZulu Natal where she studied Fine Art at the Natal Technikon. She moved to Cape Town, and since 2001 she has worked as a full time artist from her studio in Observatory. In 2014, Jenny completed a Post Graduate Diploma at Michaelis School of Fine Art, graduating with distinction. She moved her home and studio to Riebeek West in 2015. Parsons has exhibited extensively throughout South Africa and is represented in a number of local and international collections.
Fragment (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Fields (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Farms (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Remnants (2018) Oil on Canvas 40 x 45 cm
Ramble (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Islands (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Silence (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Koppie (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Swartland (2018) Oil on canvas 40 x 45 cm
Oxalis (2018) Oil on board 35 x 30 cm
Summer 1 (2018) Oil on board 35 x 30 cm
Grasses (2018) Oil on board 35 x 30 cm
Summer 2 (2018) Oil on board 35 x 30 cm
Boundaries (2018) Ink on archival paper 130 x 150 cm
Edges (2018) Ink on archival paper 130 x 150 cm