Riveting rifts

Acclaimed environmental artist Georgia Papageorge on rifts and religion 

“Dramatic” only just begins to describe the power and emotion that Georgia Papageorge’s videos, photos and canvasses evoke in the viewer. Whether it’s the 20 metre long banners of red butcher linen strewn across Namibian sands that demand your attention or the stark “bloodlines” running alongside the icy peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro that stir something within, all her of Papageorge’s artworks seem to elicit a similar response: a mesmerised stare, followed by a moment of awe and wonder.

For  a start, there’s the sheer scale and size of her projects. In the name of art, Papageorge has flown  over the Sowa Salt Pan in Botswana – dropping down her impermanent red marks from a helicopter – and she has even  summited Mount Kilimanjaro while completing her Kilimanjaro/Coldfire series of artworks. Perhaps the energy embodied by the young,  tree-climbing, horse riding  Papageorge still fuels her imagination today and sees her larger than life concepts realised, no matter the obstacle –  or mountain range –  that stands in her way.

Then there are the grand concepts and themes underlying her impressive artworks. Papageorge’s obsession with  geological rifts, she says, is directly born out of an internal rift  within herself. The artist lost her two-year-old daughter to cancer when she was 28 years old, and turned to a degree in Fine Art at Unisa as a means of focusing her emotion.

After doing  a series of politicised pieces at university that dealt with the  barriers that had to be removed between human beings of various different cultures, Papageorge fine- tuned her focus and  turned to the environment to get her messages about  social and political schisms across.

One of her best-known  projects is her Kilimanjaro/Coldfire series, boasting bright red banners streaking across the cold landscapes of Kilimanjaro as a means for Papageorge to  grapple with the weighty subject of global warming and the melting of the ice caps.

“Kilimanjaro has always been chocolate box stuff – you only ever see that type of image of it, but in my work I wanted to take it very seriously,” she explains. “Kilimanjaro was a huge icon in Africa –  a mountain three degrees south of the equator covered in snow. The first time I saw the mountain, people were not that aware of global warming. I did two major projects between 1996 and 2000, and then I didn’t go back for some years. When I went back in 2005,  I was shattered by how much the ice had melted.”

To read Papageorge’s works only for the dominant surface themes, however, is to do her art a great disservice. Beyond the environment and a preoccupation with the damage that man has wreaked on the planet is a driving force as powerful as global warming,  namely the strong religious thread that further binds her concepts together.

“My work is very religious,” she says. “I’m Catholic, and I’m dealing with the trans-substantiation of matter. “I’m taking and applying the idea of  mass –  the body and blood of Christ, which  is transformed into bread and wine – and transforming mere cloth into lines of fire and blood. They are symbolic lines,  symbolic of fire and blood. In my Kilimanjaro works, I see water as the lifeblood of Africa.”

Rifts and religion become one in Papageorge’s riveting artworks, making for a subject matter that crosses countries and continents with its resonance and universality. Her exhibition Bridgeworks is on at the Association of Arts Pretoria, 173 Mackie Street, Nieuw Muckleneuk, Pretoria, until July 27.

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 20 July 2011.