cyanotype on Arches Platine cotton rag

Artwork date: 2018
Signature details: signed
Edition: number 3, from an edition of 5

(1)

image size: 54 x 74 cm, sheet size: 56 x 76 cm, unframed

Notes:

Stephen Inggs was born in Cape Town and grew up in Johannesburg, London and Umbogintwini on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal. He studied Fine Art in Durban at Technikon Natal, Brighton Polytechnic and the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg where he completed a MA(FA) degree. Inggs teaches at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, where he is a professor. He has held regular solo exhibitions of his creative work in London, Cape Town and Johannesburg. His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions and he was a prize-winner at the International Print Triennial in Krakow, Poland. Inggs has also curated numerous print portfolios, produced and published an artist's book on the art and technique of lithography, and a monograph of his work titled 665 Making Prints with Light. His projects have been largely located in lithography, photography and printmaking, each of which has a complex history and relationship to issues of identity and the politics of knowledge. The influence of technology on aesthetic criteria in printmaking and photography is an ongoing concern that has informed his creative production. His work is held in public and private collections locally and abroad, including the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Durban Art Gallery, Durban; University of Cape Town, Cape Town; Northwestern University, Evanston; Rand Merchant Bank; MTN; Sanlam; Liberty Life; Standard Bank; Library of Congress, Washington; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington; Ralph Lauren; and Takashimaya. "In one sense, I situate my work as a confluence, where my love of the sea and consciousness of environmental issues intersect. In trying to make sense of these

paradoxical concerns, I am interested in 'both the beautiful and the repulsive, the desirable and the repellent' (Susik, 2012) qualities of the ocean. At the fringe of land where the shore and the sea meet, the shoreline is not only a threshold to the ocean, but also a liminal place where one can contemplate the beauty, vastness and power of the sea, as a place of both pleasure and dismay. As philosopher Edmund Burke articulated, the qualities and causes of the sublime – expressed as the untamed power of the natural world – move us more profoundly than the beautiful." "As a visual practitioner as well as a surfer who has been catching waves for more than half a century, this wild omnipotence is something observed as much as experienced. I love the qualities of atmosphere and its constituent elements of light, air and water that I use in my work as an artist and photographer. But it is the act of crossing the shoreline from land to sea where one is literally immersed in the sublime connecting a temporal perspective with a contemplative dimension. Reflecting as much on beauty and freedom as what we have done and continue to do to our environment in ruining the majesty of the ocean." This work was exhibited as part of Shoreline, curated by Alastair Whitton, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town (2018).