Ideogram for Green (The Photospectror)

Adriette Myburgh, an artist and trained architect has been selected as a finalist for the Celeste Art Prize 2007 and the Red Mansion Art Prize 2005 & 2006. Adriette won a commendation award in 2004, through ECD Architects for the ‘Colleges of the Future’ design competition, sponsored by RIBA and the Learning and Skills Council. She has won second place in the annual Kempton Park/Tembisa Art Competition, South-Africa in 2001 and has participated in several exhibitions in Johannesburg, London and Dublin since 1993, which include a solo exhibition at The Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg in 1999 and a group exhibition at The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 2005.

Ideogram for green (yellow sun)

It is not enough for process concepts of this kind to be ontological. They must be ontogenetic: they must be equal to emergence.

In such a creative evolutionary process, each artwork that is made, affects the following work, while each new work reflects back on the previous work. Each artwork is a species and carries the genetic make-up for the following work, as in a parent-child relationship and forms a phylogeny, or a matrix of combinatorial activities. Making art is a structure-generating process which results in decentralized assemblages of heterogeneous components. Myburgh unearths the hidden secrets behind the virtual mechanics that makes the world function.

Myburgh explores the shifting terrain of the nature/culture continuum of our contemporary world. Myburgh’s artworks are not individual entities where the making of one piece produces an artwork that is a closed and unified whole. Myburgh’s art consists of a population of works derived from a virtual creative evolutionary process.

She views the world and its processes as consisting of hidden connections where structures of evolving cycles are turning within other cycles. The world is a role model to understand the creative processes of constant qualitative growth and decline. The idea presupposing a closed and finished world gives way to an open world full of divergent processes yielding novel and unexpected entities. Evolution in nature is inventive and it is useful to study its natural processes of change. Myburgh applies these evolutionary concepts as tools to question the way the world works- culturally, socially, environmentally and economically. She seeks the pulse inside the workings of the phenomenal world, and uses this to construct a new language to examine a world that hasn’t yet settled.

Ideogram for Green (blue water)Photos: Laura Braun