Terra – Jeannette Unite

Description

It is hard to imagine anything less obviously poetic than the machineries of mining or the scarred landscapes left over when mineral wealth has been extracted from the earth.

But for the past decade, Cape Town artist Jeannette Unite has been developing a highly personalised subject matter out of the public face of mining operations, using pigments ground from the leftover minerals in her drawings and paintings, and recycling junk from mining sites in series of images embedded in glass.

Simultaneously material and metaphorical, Unite’s explorations have been brought together in a new book edited by UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art lecturer and theorist, Andrew Lamprecht, together with Independent Newspapers’ Investigations Editor, Ivor Powell. Entitled Terra, it is published by the new art academic SoSo Press.

Included in the book are essays by, among others, Lamprecht , arts writers Ashraf Jamal and Kim Gurney, along with the academic geophysicist Marian Tredoux