Everyday experience informs the work of artist, Belinda Blignaut. Through the processing of immediate surroundings she creates her work. Listening is required in making. Listening to yourself, to your materials, to the world. This is especially true of working with the earth, with mud. Intimacy with the material and engagement with the earth means that change can take place in the heart and mind. It is from this need for change that she began her recent performative series, “Working From The Inside”. Standing inside the vessel to build, she forms a second skin around herself from mud/clay, or “earth skin”, continually taking herself and the clay as far as possible. This speaks of both the physical and psychological. This is a fight to surrender, to be transformed every single time. The material is malleable, filled with memory and a history of millions of years, in a constant state of flux.

For the new series, Blignaut, in collaboration with Jacques Van Zyl, has recorded the sounds of the making process from inside the earth, where she digs her own clay, right through to the making of the work with a microphone on the inside, to the final stages where mud is changed to stone through intense heat.