Published 28 July 2026 in News
Quiet Topographies Group Exhibition
White River Gallery at The Studio
The Studio, 48b 5th Avenue, Parktown North, Johannesburg, South Africa
25 July - 08 August 2026
"Quiet Topographies is the first exhibition featuring the press.on artists, established in 2025.
We are a close group of South African artists, long known to each other professionally and individually. Most of us are artist/printmakers, although members of our group work in other 2-dimensional mediums too, and we create not only prints using many techniques, but also drawings, paintings, frottages, artists books, and print and drawn 3-dimensional works.
We join forces from time to time to take part in press.on projects while still maintaining our individual creative professional practices. Our inaugural project is exhibited here, a print exchange produced over the summer of 2025/2026. The idea was not to have a prescriptive subject, but to allow each of us to make works in our own printing style and using the themes that usually concern us within a given paper size.
Surprisingly, the images that arrived at the collection point all showed similar creative concerns. Ways of engaging visually with the natural world had been uppermost, though used differently as symbols for significant emotions or awarenesses around the environment.
The artworks submitted here by the artists prove to be an expansion on the print exchange – each artist continuing along their own path. But subtle conversations were built up between the works once they were installed in the gallery.
For some of us, the mediums we choose are important underpinnings to our work. Natasha Norman’s Japanese printmaking technique - Mokuhanga - embraces the Wabi Sabi principles of imperfection, transience, and simplicity as generative forces, while Yolanda Warnich’s return to the clarity of pencil on paper for her abstract landscapes speak of attention and immersion, echoing her close connection to the land.
Laurel Holmes and Noeleen Kleve create their works by concentrating on the organic structures in their natural environs, using them in a meditative way by focusing on patterns, textures, movements, rhythms. Their images offer a space for the contemplation of transformation and renewal.
Johann Booyens, Marelise van Wyk, and Mandy Conidaris consider humankind’s effect on our bionetwork by exploring how earlier layers can be partially revealed below newer ones. Booyens is fascinated by the transitional overlap between culture and nature, as he overlaps his landscape images with geometric shapes; van Wyk’s work is inspired by palimpsestic layering caused by erosion and decomposition, and she sometimes makes use of old rusted etching plates; and Conidaris makes graphite frottages using linocut blocks with images of Fynbos on crumpled paper.
For all of us, the important elements in our artmaking are time, patience, and a quiet way looking – both internally and externally."
Natasha Norman l Tobi-ishi l 2026 l Atenashi bokashi l 57,5 x 46,5cm