I am interested in abstracting the landscape and distilling the sense of a place or experience - so
that anyone who knows the place, can recognise it in the work, but without illustration. I see
abstracted landscape as a convergence of the horizontal elevation with aerial perspective,
combined with the layers beneath the surface; the stratification and manipulation of the land
below the surface that reflects the history of a place, geological or manufactured. I live in an old
gold mining city – Johannesburg – a modern capital built over hollowed out and hidden, miles of
mining tunnels. Jo’burg has more than a century of gold mining history. Accreted, enormous
mounds of limey and pale compacted silt, the tailings, scar the landscape – providing evidence
the hollowing out of the earth below the city in search of the precious metal and wealth. These
so-called ‘mine dumps’ mostly surround older and industrial parts of the city and surrounds. They
are golden in colour but deceiving; toxic piles of caked, parched and compacted acid waste earth
which punctuate the surrounding parched ‘veld’, the dry and dusty grasslands of muted sage
greens and dry beige interspersed with outcrops of rust and dark granite rock. The desecrated
landscape is contrasted against big sky, pale and plumbago-blue often though, ashen and grey
from pollution. In the summer months, the sky can become darkened and brooding, as
impending thunderstorms bring relief to the dusty dryness and temporarily wash away the dust.
The mine dumps are slowly disappearing from the Jo’burg landscape. These sedimented
embankments of silt are gradually being recycled and refined to extract the last of the remaining
gold. There is also illegal mining activity at play in deserted dumps and shafts.
In as few as ten years from now, the dumps may no longer exist. My latest body of work, my
painting, is my way of documenting my experience in living in the city but also my memory of
Jo’burg, my sense of the place I have lived in for the past 60 years.
Debbie Glencross