Press, Papers, Curation & Production
PRESS
to look with quiet eyes
Essay by Keely Shinners
“Grindrod’s presentation involves similar methods applied to the Rorke’s Drift tapestries and related artefacts. She has pounced belts to study how their beads were laid. Copied motifs across oil paintings and watercolours. Developed swatches of colour references drawn from the tapestries and telephone wire imbenge, which she has gathered into assemblages called ‘stacks’. Scanned, reproduced, and blown up images of the tapestry to get up close to the materiality of its construction, the ineffable magic begotten where warp meets weft.”
Fecund
Article by Mary Corrigall
“Until we find a way to value the feminine principle – which is about care, interconnection and regeneration – we’re stuck in a world shaped by a technological, masculine mindset that’s led to a lot of our current crises.”
Essay 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.”
Small Fables
Essay by Keely Shinners
“Grindrod is inspired by the ‘animist sense of wonder at transmutation’ that is taken for granted in the visual language of fairy tales. A frog becomes a prince. A wolf becomes a grandmother. A hare sits at the table for tea. This fluidity between human and animal is, in her view, a counter-response to Enlightenment-era emphasis on rationality, veracity, and empiricism that have come to define Western society.”
Last Light
Review by Anna Stielau, ArtThrob
“Josie Grindrod’s Last Light is an exhibition of impressions. Framed by T.S. Eliot’s Landscape: New Hampshire, it presents a collection of nearly 100 paintings and prints which, like the poem, read as vivid fragments strung together by an irregular meter.”
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Opening speech by Tracy Murinik
“Josie Grindrod’s delicate paintings and assemblages pose questions around the way in which knowledge is presented in the didactic visual displays of 60s encyclopaedias – everything meticulously categorised”
PAPERS
Record of Proceedings, 28th SAVAH Conference, University of Cape Town, 5 - 8 September 2013
Fragilising and Resistant Narratives in the work of Sfiso Ka Mkame and Vivienne Koorland
My contribution to this conference draws from my practice as a painter. In pursuit of generating a conceptual and material working method of my own, I wish to learn from two images which continue to move me deeply: Letters to God (1988) by Sfiso Ka Mkame and Tomaz’s Garden (1990) by Vivien Koorland.
34th Annual SAVAH Conference, Speaking with Ghosts: Hauntology, Memory, Nostalgia and Other Ways of Engaging with the Past/Present/Future
Warburg’s Gesture as Object of Enquiry: Ghastly Tenderness and the Doubly Present
Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa
12 – 13 September 2019
Art South Africa: Vol 11, Issue 2, Summer 2012
Untying Ties that Bind
I made the artwork Ties that Bind (2010–2012) to narrate an intergenerational experience of trauma, knowing that catastrophic loss could profoundly impact the way that visioning takes place in the subject. The subsequent use of the work as case study to investigate psychoanalyst/artist Bracha L. Ettinger’s notion of the feminine gaze and its implications for transformation proved highly instructive.
CURATION AND PRODUCTION
Under Cover of Darkness
By Simthandile Xameni and Tracey Heever of Iziko Museums
“Curated by Carine Zaayman and produced by Josie Grindrod, the exhibition brings to light the many untold stories of women forced into slavery and oppressive labour under colonialism.”