The colour of the sea when driving back home at the end of a day in February is undefined. It needs a new word but there is no word for a colour like that at about eight o’clock on a warm summer’s evening. Perhaps it is the colour of whale songs or the colour of fish memories or the colour of  a million tides collected over centuries. Imagine the voices rising and sinking to the hues of Auro Metal Saurus (nice name for a rock band), Munsell, Cool black, International Klein Blue. The colour is saturated with all the wonder of all the creatures living and dead in its depths and on its surface: crabs, amphipods, fanworms, Sargassum fish, ribbon weed…

Months later the dictionary is stained. A one legged man floats towards the rocks, the shark disappears, still hungry.

-Lien Botha, June 2012

IMAGE:
Lien Botha, Visse vat loop op water (from the Safari series, 2003), digital archival print.

This text was produced by Botha as a contribution to Cross-Currents, a group exhibition in which her work is included, showing at David Krut Projects Cape Town, 31 July – 25 August 2012.  Cross-Currents presents a selection of works that draw on ideas of the sea, literally – as in, how do we relate to the sea and how have we related to it over time – and metaphorically – what does the sea stand for and how do we extrapolate the psychological implications of the idioms that we’ve developed around the ocean.

Read more about the exhibition here.
Read more about Lien Botha here.