NYMPHÉAS: Les Femmes Émergentes – In Conversation with Monet
Nymphéas grew from a very quiet place. Its earliest impulse lies in childhood memories of the artist’s grandmother’s lily pond on a Free State farm — a place of stillness and constant movement. That early experience of water remained, not as a fixed image, but as a way of understanding the world.
In this body of work, water functions as more than a subject. It becomes an archive: a surface that reflects, distorts, preserves, and sometimes erases. Memory here is not nostalgia, but a way of seeing — fluid, partial, and continually reformed.
The exhibition reflects on how women pass on experience without naming it. While sitting together, the artist’s grandmother crocheted — small, patient acts of making that unfolded alongside conversation and silence. Only years later did these gestures reveal themselves as formative, shaping ways of seeing, attending, and connecting.
Nymphéas considers what might be called the mothers we inherit — not only biologically, but emotionally and perceptually. The works explore how gestures, sensitivities, and ways of being are carried forward quietly, often beyond conscious awareness.
The exhibition enters into dialogue with Claude Monet’s late Nymphéas, not as homage, but as resonance. Monet painted water as his eyesight was deteriorating, when the visible world softened and dissolved. This shared interest in fragility, perception, and the threshold between clarity and loss forms a conceptual bridge across time.
Presented in South Africa, Nymphéas: Les Femmes Émergentes marks a homecoming — a return that allows personal memory and collective history to meet. The works invite viewers to slow down, linger, and allow their own connections to surface.
One of the works in the exhibition, Between Forms, was selected for Artsy’s “Most Loved” list, which highlights both established and emerging artists whose works resonate strongly with audiences. The exhibition was also featured across local and international media, including Cape Times, Die Burger, Your Luxury Africa, Netwerk24, and MapMyWay, and the artist was invited to speak about the work on a live talk show on Fine Music Radio, Cape Town.
