IN MINIATURE Group Exhibition of Small-Scale South African Modern & Contemporary Artworks by Olga Speakes In Miniature features modern and contemporary South African artworks by emerging and established artists who have chosen to or, at times, been forced to explore working on a small and even minute scale. The premise for this assembly of smaller scale objects comes from the desire to understand, and even to give in to, the sense of scaling down, retreating from and re-considering the massive and the gigantic in their overbearing manifestations, not just in art and architecture, but in wider experiences of everyday life, in local and international politics, in our relationship with the natural world. The sense of impending disaster and the experiences of real ones that so many of humanity face now call for retreat to the inner world, to that which is essential, comforting, and trustworthy. Living in historical times has always come at a cost – grand historical narratives do not spare “the little man”, destroying his accumulations of worldly goods, status, and claims to consequence. Amassed riches get swept aside, grand palaces and gigantic monuments turn to rubble, and priceless art collections get looted or destroyed. What we choose to save in those moments is what matters and can often fit in the palm of one’s hand or in one’s pocket – a photograph, a small object, a memento of life lived and cherished. In his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), British ceramicist Edmund De Waal tells the story of his Jewish family through their collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures, which were saved from the 1938 looting by the Nazis and became the uniting thread holding the narrative together and the family linked through many years of historical and geographical dispersal. The small intricately carved objects were made to be held, played with, and, in the book as well as in real life, become symbolic of memory and connection rather than loss and distance. They are “small, quick, ivory stories”. Miniatures and small-scale artworks included in this exhibition, whether sculptures or paintings, invite close looking and handling, establishing a level of intimacy and trust between the artist and the viewer. They evoke a sense of nostalgia, an ephemeral link to one’s own story or an idealized past held in objects and memory. Peter Clark’s linocuts capture the beauty of the ordinary in masterful compositions that could fit in the palm of your hand. The artist never had a studio of his own, which would have dictated the scale at which he had to work and perhaps concentrated the deep sense of tenderness and care evident in his prints. Sitaara Stodels’ tiny three-dimensional collages may seem playful and whimsical, but they carry the weight of memory as the ever-elusive attempts to create an ideal home by someone who, as a child, was denied a sense of safety and was forced to move over thirty times. Stodel’s object-compositions seem to be caught on the edge between coming together and dispersing into a million remnants of her miniature world, which merges memory and imagination. For Yolanda Mazwana, working on small ceramic sculptures provided an opportunity to learn, experiment, and focus on the beauty of the process; to embrace the meticulous patience required by working on a small scale. Thinking of her hand-sized sculptures as journals of ideas, the artist believes they allow her to reflect and deepen her practice while remaining unique expressions of a particular moment. She admits that, if she had to choose, she would save her journals and artist notebooks as the most precious objects in a perilous situation. Every artwork in the exhibition opens an opportunity for a unique bond with the viewer, the merging and “the slow accretion of stories”. Looking at them and holding them, in the words of De Waal, I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing”.