Kali van der Merwe's photographs are a symphony of unimaginable brilliance.
She works with long exposures and light to capture inner states of being. Attuning this same vision to flora, Kali has been inspired by fynbos she comes into daily contact with. A house swop has had her living on a smallholding near the village of Baardskeeerdersbos since January this year. Working towards a book, she is writing about her encounters with the plant beings she photographs.
http://www.kali.co.za/
She works with long exposures and light to capture inner states of being. Attuning this same vision to flora, Kali has been inspired by fynbos she comes into daily contact with. A house swop has had her living on a smallholding near the village of Baardskeeerdersbos since January this year. Working towards a book, she is writing about her encounters with the plant beings she photographs.
http://www.kali.co.za/
Kali's work got me thinking about women 'through the flower' who express their sexuality with flowers. Judy Chicago superimposed the butterfly and flower, and the folds of feminine beauty, vagina, vulva and clitoris, creating a visual imagery to describe feminine sexuality, orgasmic sensation, mestruation and birthing. Hers were images of pain too. Not just those of the physical but the pain of claiming the right to express feminine sexuality through creativity. Taboos of pornography and patriarchal society have made this very hard for women artists. The gaze is always assumed to be male, the gaze is one of male intrusion and so often domination and danger. The taboos of a repressed society make women who make these kinds of works often guarded. Judy Chicago refused to be muffled and silenced and she made her struggle public. Her famous work of the Dinner Party with 39 place settings plates dedicated to famous women voices in literature, art and history.
Judy Chicago
The Return of The Butterfly
The Dinner Party
Primordial Goddess
Chistine de Pisan
Bodacea
Virginia Woolf
Georgia O'Keeffe
The Crowning
The Birthing Project
Kali is also a case in point. She has been writing about her love of the flowers of the fynbos, their exquisite sensuality and their lives of beauty and pollination as bees brush down over them and make love to the flowers.She put some of her eroticaally descriptive writings on her blog and female friends, rightly or wrongly said, Kali you cant do this! You are exposing yourself to danger...like one of your precious flowers.....the Internet is such a public domain....a predator may come down and swoop on you....be careful! And there have been experiences of this so it is not just imagined....going too public can lay one open (literarlly) as a women, to misinerpretation.. Kali's flowers are magical and come to life in a secret night life as they dance before her camera, revealing revelling themselves without any writing necessary.
Kali van der Merwe
Georgia O' Keeffe was before Judy and Kali. She painted her large sensuous flowers inviting one to walk right into their intimate gaze.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Red Maple
Orchid
Blue Flower
Red Canna
Poppy
Grey Line
Georgia O' Keeffe
