Moving Mountains

After living in the same town and the same house my whole life, in September 2016 I got on a plane for only the second time in my life to fly to a foreign country for the first time in my life. I moved to South Korea for a year to teach English in an attempt to escape, challenge myself, and grow. Having recently been reconciled to the one who made me, I knew I wasn’t truly going alone, and it made all the difference. As a lover of mountains, I was sad to leave my mountain-populated town of Stellenbosch, and was hesitant about my new environment. What a moment it was when we descended on the city of Busan and I beheld the city weaving it’s way around a gathering of mountains.

Moving Mountains with it’s connotations of faith, video, environment changes, overcoming obstacles & journeying, shares my time in South Korea through a series of ten drawings, created as responses to a series of ten video recordings each communicating a portion of one out of ten mountain experiences. Five drawings were created in my small apartment on the twenty fifth floor in a suburb located at the foot of one of the mountains that formed my subject matter, Jangsan – And five drawings still lie ahead, after about three and a half years of being back in South Africa.

In the spirit of sharing tastes of my new surroundings with my loved ones back home, I spontaneously started recording with my cellphone as I explored this altered mountain environment and resolved to communicate this movement through drawing. In continuing with my interest in time, space and process I worked in a manner deliberately aware of the impact of my new ‘space’ on my drawings. The drawings embrace movement but are also the result of being limited by the dimensions of my desk in my small apartment, in a country forced to grow vertically rather than in the horizontal way that I was so accustomed to. In my instinctual mode of creating a pattern and controlling the chaos I decided that all the drawings would be the same semi-forced format, which were about the dimensions of my desk. Another pattern that developed was noting the length of the video near the bottom middle of the page, in keeping with the format on the screen, the video’s outline that became so familiar to me because of the many times I had to play and pause. I also proceeded to jot down the number of times I replayed the video as I drew near the bottom right of the page. And for the final act, I enjoyed a time of still image for the same length as one play of the video. A focus on process all culminating in it’s own unique experience. Then so tactile, so true to that space. Now so nostalgic, with this pattern of drawings to show for it.

Then/There

Now/Here