The air between us: Katherine Spindler | Carolyn Parton

Carolyn Parton is primarily a sculptural painter, extending the medium through her investigation of paint as physical matter embedded with memory. Because of a deep interest in the human potential to transform energy and matter, her primary focus is its impact on living beings and the natural environment. In particular the accumulative traces left by human behaviour on earth. Therefore, she views the creative act as holding the potential to transform destruction.

Parton holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (cum laude) from the University of South Africa. Her published research article Extended Traces: Tracking the impact of painter upon environment has been the foundation of her work since 2010. To date she has held solo exhibitions in both South Africa and London, the most recent being Songs Beneath the Surface at Sulger-Buel Gallery in London. Group exhibitions include Matereality at Iziko South African National Gallery and The Future is Female at Sulger-Buel Gallery London.

Her work is represented in the permanent collections of The Constitutional Court of South Africa, Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art, University of Cape Town and the University of South Africa.

The unlikely marriage of movement and stillness, of tumult and quietude, is a defining characteristic of Katherine Spindler’s oeuvre, eliciting a similar mix of emotion in the viewer. In examining Spindler’s paintings one has the sense that things are moving just beneath and beyond the surface, too vast to fully perceive or understand. With a quiet immensity and arresting gravitas, Spindler’s work sees light and shadow flicker and evade, swirl in eddies, swell and recede. The surface of the canvas, like water, is unstable, constantly shifting and undulating while maintaining a meditative stillness that both captivates and mystifies. Often blurring, veiling, or erasing the images she works with, Spindler’s intention is to evoke rather than explicate, to suggest more than to prescribe.

Spindler completed both her BA(FA) (2004) and MFA (2011) with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (UCT) where she won numerous awards including the MacIver Scholarship. She lectured part time in drawing and printmaking at the Michaelis School of Art (2012-2016) and taught in the Art Department of Bishops Diocesan College (2014-2020). She currently lectures part time at the Cape Town Creative Academy.

To date the artist has presented various solo exhibitions of her paintings including a landmark show titled Still at the 2018 FNB Joburg Art Fair. Spindler’s work has been selected for inclusion in a number of curated group exhibitions notably Air at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg in 2016. In 2018 Barnard published To Hold Time, the first book on the artist’s work which was subsequently added to the Thomas J. Watson Library Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.