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Sculpture Guide

The Songsmith Great Karoo
Jenna Burchell

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Jenna Burchell's Songsmith

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Jenna Burchell is an award-winning South African artist from Pietermaritzburg, who works with sound and sculpture to create large-scale environments that invite the audience to interact with them. She is especially interested in songs, stories and histories that “have no voice or sound”, and says that her work serves as a means to explore and find ways to preserve memory. Burchell was the recipient of the Thami Mnyele Fine Art Award in 2011 and her works have featured as special projects at various art fairs, including the FNB Joburg Art Fair and the Art15 in London.

 

Songsmith (The Great Karoo) is part two of Burchell’s Songsmith series. Burchell embeds sound instruments into ancient rocks from prehistoric locations, chosen for their long histories and rich narratives. The sculptures respond to touch, revealing carefully composed songs about the history of the site where the rock was found.

 

Inspired by Kintsukuroi; which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold laquer, Burchell uses golden repairs to signify the passage of time. These repairs also  serve a functional purpose – they are sensors, revealing embedded songs with the wave of a hand. Through this, Burchell creates in interactive archive of time and memory.

 

Burchell chose three sites to gather her rocks: the Cradle of Humankind, The Great Karoo and the Vredefort Dome, each representing a moment of historical change. When gathering, she follows a set of four rules:

  1. The rock must be found within the relevant geographic site.

  2. The rock must be fractured naturally.

  3. The segments of rock must form a complete whole when put together.

  4. Once made whole, the rock must be beautiful.

 

Each work within Songsmith is titled with the GPS coordinate of where the original rock was found. With the help of geophysicists, Burchell records electromagnetics frequencies from these sites and turns them into musical notes. These notes form the unique song that each rock in Songsmith sings.

 

This edition of Songsmith (The Great Karoo) is permanently installed at Spier wine estate. The installation represents the location of the rocks where Burchell originally found them, allowing the audience to mirror Burchell’s journey as she collected them.

 

According to Burchell; “Songsmith is above all else an assertion of life and its beauty, not in spite of, but in acknowledgement of ruin.”

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