giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag

Artwork date: 2017
Signature details: accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist
Edition: number 1 from an edition of 6 + 2AP

(1)

image size: 55.5 x 84 cm, framed size: 80 x 109 cm

Notes:

Margaret Courtney-Clarke lives and works in Swakopmund, Namibia. Following a degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa in 1971, she enrolled at Scuola Libera di Roma in Rome, Italy in 1974 and completed her studies at the New York University, USA with a Bachelor of Arts in Photojournalism in 1978. In 2019, Courtney-Clarke was shortlisted for the Contemporary African Photography Prize, as well as the prestigious Prix Pictet global award in photography and sustainability. Further nominations and awards for her photographic publications include the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (longlisted) for Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain; the 2018 Photo District News Award for A Lifelong Obsession with Finding Shelter; and the 2015 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award for her series On Borrowed Time. Recent exhibitions include Hope, as part of the Prix Pictet photography award shortlist – in 2019 the exhibition travelled from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Porter Gallery, London to the Hillside Forum, Tokyo; in 2020 it was on view at the Luma Westbau, Zurich before traveling to the Mouravie"-Apostol House & Museum, Moscow. In 2019, her work was included in Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit. Courtney- Clarke’s retrospective Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain was presented at SMAC Gallery, Stellenbosch, in 2018.Notable collections featuring work by Courtney-Clarke include: WÜRTH Collection, Munich; National Geographic Collection, Washington; Norval Foundation, Cape Town; the Holbar Collection, Lichtenstein; the Robert Devereux Collection, The African Arts Trust, London; the Hermés Collection, Paris; and the BHP Billiton Collection, Melbourne. This work is from the series Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain. "Margaret returned to Namibia, the country of her birth and upbringing, in 2008 to live in Swakopmund on the edge of the Namib desert. The photographs she produced are about existence. They come from an awareness of the fragility of her own existence and from a symbiotic grasp of the ancient rhythms of the desert and the coast, the ways of life of its people, the traces of their passing and the seemingly inexorable advance of corporate and mining development. The photographs are bare of nostalgia, fat or facile certainties. They are eloquent of raw existence and o"er faint glimmers of hope, of life scratched from an appallingly inhospitable terrain in the face of overwhelming societal transition. Yet these photographs attain a searing grace which is in no sense false to the reality but is, on the contrary, a rare synthesis of what is there with an intensely heightened and uncompromisingly honest vision. Margaret’s relationship with the people she has photographed in this work is practical and intimate, never patronising, almost that of family rather than of compassionate observer. It is of a piece with the wholeness of her embrace." – David Goldblatt, May 2016. Extract from Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (Steidl, 2017)