Rock Dove Song
Daor Contemporary presented a solo exhibition by Carol-Anne Gainer
26.09.2019 – 08.11.2019
In recognition of October as Mental Health Awareness Month
Carol-Anne Gainer, After Image – Piss Series – Performance on Paper, Artist urine, vegetable charcoal dust, ritual powder and charcoal on Fabriano, 2004-Present, 120 x 100cm
Carol-Anne Gainer, After Lascaux – Piss Series – Performance on Paper, Artist urine, vegetable charcoal dust, ritual powder and charcoal on Fabriano, 2004-Present, 120 x 100cm
Carol-Anne Gainer, Bird in Dome, Monotype on Fabriano, 2009
Carol-Anne Gainer, Come Undone, Oil on Canvas, 2019, 170 x 300cm
Carol-Anne Gainer, Darling Home, Monotype on Fabriano, 2009
Carol-Anne Gainer, Double Trouble – Piss Series – Performance on Paper, Artist urine, vegetable charcoal dust, ritual powder and charcoal on Fabriano, 2004-Present, 120 x 100cm
Carol-Anne Gainer, Flower Breath (1, 2 & 3), Oil and mixed media on canvas, 2019, 37 x 63cm
Carol-Anne Gainer, La Souterraine Lines I, Charcoal, conte, pastel over monotype paper, 2019
Carol-Anne Gainer, La Souterraine Lines II, Charcoal, conte, pastel over monotype paper, 2019
Carol-Anne Gainer, Paris Market, Monotype on Fabriano, 2009
Carol-Anne Gainer, Swarm, Installation view
Carol-Anne Gainer, Swarm, Psych meds, earth, ritual powders and oil on canvas, 2019, Dimension variable
Carol-Anne Gainer, Swarm, Psych meds, earth, ritual powders and oil on canvas, 2019, Dimension variable
Carol-Anne Gainer, Swarm, Psych meds, earth, ritual powders and oil on canvas, 2019, Dimension variable
Carol-Anne Gainer, Swarm, Psych meds, earth, ritual powders and oil on canvas, 2019, Dimension variable
Carol-Anne Gainer, Trinity Sentinels, Photogram, 2006, 200 x 150cm
Carol-Anne Gainer, After Image – Piss Series – Performance on Paper, Artist urine, vegetable charcoal dust, ritual powder and charcoal on Fabriano, 2004-Present, 120 x 100cm
In recognition of October as Mental Health Awareness Month, Daor Contemporary presented a solo exhibition by Carol-Anne Gainer, whose body of work is a response to her experience of dealing with her own circumstantial battle with mental health issues.
Carol-Anne works across a wide range of media; the materials as significant as what informs her ideas and contexts. She often adopts the use of unconventional materials (such as psych-meds, urine and ceremonial powders) to create work as a vulnerable yet powerful commentary on her own healing and a recognition of the suffering endured.
Over the past two decades Carol-Anne’s work has centred around the body, place and spirit. More specifically the invisible ties that bind us together. Containing multiple levels of meaning and embracing contradiction, her work is visually and spatially ambiguous. Almost actively resistant to a central idea, aesthetic, or fixed point.
The exhibition Rock Dove Song continues to explore these multiple, entangled, fragile and invisible connections we have with ourselves, each other and our environments.
“For a period of sixteen months from Dec 2012- April 2014, I suffered a mental health breakdown sparked by loss, a sustained period of unbelievable terror. I experienced a full- blown, 24/7 panic attack, for 16 months I hung on, I had come undone.
Now, somewhat light-heartedly, I refer to this highly anxious period in my life as a ‘faulty phase’.
It took only three days, with the right treatment, for me to peep out from under the covers of my psych-ward hospital bed, another three weeks and I was discharged under care.
Four weeks after being discharged, along with my childhood friend, on a dark starry night in the KZN Berg, lying on the grass looking up at the stars I felt, once again, that old familiar connection. The feeling of being conscious of being alive; of being part of a bigger whole, of being so small and yet so significantly here. I was alive, the stars were alive.”
– For Mom, Tint, Tony and Charles