This present body of work, "Ancient Dust" weaves hessian, cement and plaster combined with pigment and dye into timelines of longing. Whether they are long strips or wide squares, these textural blocks of colour and script integrate the spiritual and material into an interconnected story. From Ancient alphabets to iconic Yemenite embroidery the techniques that adorn these earthy backgrounds form their own identity.  Artists creates their own language. Mine is of the ancient journeying into the contemporary.

 

The materials of these works are inspired by the cloths that wrap us from the womb, through our lives, into death. The vertical warp is the solid timeline of our lives, the structures that allow us to weave our personal horizontal weft as we leave our individual mark on cultures and traditions. 

 

The story is the bridge between materials, cultures, religions and history. Living pieces, they form part of an endless canvas, a puzzle that we are continuously weaving together.

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"'If a flower can flourish in a desert, you can flourish anywhere'. Matshona Dhliwayo's wager captures the resilience and poetry that is central to Talia Goldsmith's art. As austere as they are vivacious, as ancient as they are modern, her sculptures and paintings, as though hewn from the ground, cut out from stone, define endurance. This, of course, is a mirage - her stones are not stones, her earth, however, is the holy ground from which all her art issues. Paper and cork and thread form the matter and surface of her work. Born in Yemen, in desert country, it is unsurprising that her eye and hand should be drawn to great vistas, inscrutable runes, startling colours in swathes of pale brown. Goldsmith's carvings into cork read as graphic parables of flood and plague, her earthen drop- cloths like the shreds of a Bedouin shelter, her vertically strung stones like a god-like rosary. What Goldsmith reminds us, is that abstraction is an ancient phenomenon, a speaking in tongues, from which all mortality and grace emerges. Strange beauty too."

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                                                                                                                                                 ----- Ashraf Jamal

 

ASHRAF JAMAL is the writer-researcher for ArtBankSA and a research associate in visual culture at the University of Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present, and the author of Predicaments of culture in South Africa, Love themes for the wilderness, A million years ago in the 90s, The Shades, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, Strange Cargo: Essays on Art, and Looking into the mad eye of history without blinking. Abstraction & The Figure is forthcoming.  

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