Odette Graskie / AMBEDO / CAT / EXHIBITION WITHIN THE ARTIST RESIDENCE

Have you ever been still, and let the world tell you what it wants you to hear? Show you what it has to hide? What if the forest could tell you what it wanted you to know more than anything?

You are invited to the new exhibition at the Centre for Creative Activities, Ambedo. This exhibition is about becoming still, if only for a moment, to pay attention. Ambedo is defined as a melancholic trance in which one becomes completely absorbed in vivid sensory details – of briefly being soaked in the experience of being alive, of being still and taking a breath.

Stillness hangs on the forest surrounding the city, and it is in this quiet space that the artist has moved to find a sacred meaning in the everyday act of breathing, like a tree. Like the trees, we are beings stuck in a world understood through our languages and mindsets, but what if the trees had their own mindsets and languages? I have interpreted the forest in my own imagination, and made beings that are just as alive as you or me, with their own way of living, and their own way of moving through the world. I invite you to the exhibition of interactive trees, to touch and perhaps to imagine a secret life, to soak in being alive.

Odette Graskie is a young artist born in Johannesburg, South Africa. A graduate of the University of Pretoria, she is a studio artist at End Street Studios, an extension of August House. Graskie works with storytelling in a variety of mediums, including textile art, painting and drawing.