Marianne Botha
Bio
Marianne Botha was born in South Africa where she completed a BA and MA in Fine Art at the
University of Stellenbosch. She has exhibited in Cape Town and Johannesburg (South Africa),
London (UK), Bratislava (Slovakia) and New York (USA). She now lives and works in Toronto.
Artist’s Statement
My work has always been concerned, directly or indirectly, with identity. More recently I have been focussing
on the
impact that life changing events (like relocation) has on my understanding of my relationship with the
self, the other and
the environment. Displacement through immigration has had a lasting effect on how I unpack concepts around
personal
identity. This became the starting point for my more recent works where self portraits and landscapes
become the
markers for displacement and dislocation.
Portraits and self portraits have always been linked to identity, but for me the landscape has also become
strongly linked
to that identity. Landscape is political and public, but it can also be private and imbued with a nostalgia
that carries with
it memory and personal history. In a single breath it can communicate both belonging and alienation.
These works are part of a larger series of works in which I repeated the same landscape and face. I am
interested in
repetition and the subtle and spontaneous changes that occur with each reworking.
Origin. Oil on canvas, 36" x 48"
<< back to Art in the Fall main page |
