I want to share thoughts about connecting – making art whilst walking along a train line. I thought I was walking a ghost line alone, but I found that others carry their own maps of this place. My photographer friend didn’t just capture light and vistas; he captured the skin of the station. Maarten’s generous photographs gave me a way to see the human shadow before it disappears completely. His lens and my hand are both trying to slow down time.
My walking companions didn’t just provide safety; they provided the ‘human noise’ that makes the ‘Beautiful Silence’ of the line so profound.
I connected with people who had real connections to the SAR – working on the rail, and who have shared images and memories of this experience. Fellow walkers in the valley joined my ‘scouting’ trips, and even suggested this be listed as a walking route for the group. My son came a long to make a video of the walk with a drone – what a beautiful way to view the line.
In my research, I’ve had to ask: ‘What used to be here?’ The answers are always a mix of fact and melancholy. People don’t just remember the trains; they remember the sound of the signal or the smell of the smoke. These stories are the ‘Prima Materia’—the raw material I am now rubbing into the Xuan paper.
Talks with other artists lead to interesting discussions and possibilities of collaborating with each other. Below is a letter from an artist friend in Italy who started a durational painting working project that he calls Correspondence. I joined his project and became part of a growing online network of participants whose observations become paintings, which David then literally shares around the world. In short, the artist randomly selects one observation and uses it as the starting point for a painting. In practice, he will make five paintings each week, each beginning with a different participant’s observation. Each painting begins as a work measuring 48 × 24 cm. When it is finished, he cuts the painting into two halves and posts the other half to the participant whose observation he used. One-half remains in the project archive. Below is my letter from him, which I received on 14 April, telling me he has chosen my observation.
Hi Karen Your observation has been chosen during the random selection process and will be used as the starting point for a painting made today. “I found the trace of a decommissioned train line. Finding that ‘Invisible Line’ wasn’t a discovery, it became the birth of a new way of seeing the ground beneath my …”(I had to invoke a rule to truncate all observations at 30 words because some people wrote me chapter and verse) I plan to send you half of the painting via standard (untracked) postal service, folded gently inside an envelope. Please reply to this email with your postal address, including:
- Name (as it should appear on the envelope)
- Full address
- Country
The address should be one where you are normally able to receive personal mail. Project documentation (exhibitions and online) may include your name, city/region, and country. If you would prefer your name to appear as “Anonymous”, then please state this in your reply. I promise that I will only use your full postal address for sending the painting, and it will never be made public. Please reply to this email with your postal details within 7 calendar days. After that date, the painting will be classified as an orphan and retained in the project archive. Once received, I will email you an acknowledgement of receipt. Thank you for taking part in Correspondence. If anything is unclear, please feel free to ask. Best wishes, David. (Karen – apologies for the formal mail – it’s a standard template 🤓)
My reason for including this letter is that it is connected to my project and people. I love how David invoked his rules – he had to shorten the words I sent him. I like how my work has now crossed with another – creativity never stops to amaze me! It reminds me that these ‘missing pieces’, which I am so drawn to, are universal. The decay of a paint chip in Riebeek West speaks the same language as a ruin in Europe. (Now I hope the South African Postal Services keep their end of the deal and deliver my part of David’s artwork.)
8,000 kilometres from Riebeek West to Italy, bridged by a single sentence about a 1928 rail.
A few days later, David replied that the work had been done during this week in his studio:
Day 4. “I found the trace of a decommissioned train line. Finding that ‘Invisible Line’ wasn’t a discovery, it became the birth of a new way of seeing the ground beneath my …”
K.S, South Africa
“He’s gone all Jackson Pollock!”
This observation allowed me to make a performance piece. Listening intently to a 25-minute recording of a steam train, I drew continuously, with both hands, using oil pastel — translating the implied movement of an absent railway into a shift in how the ground is read.
Below are the twin halves of David’s original painting, which he did with oil pastels while interpreting the sound of a steam train. I now look forward to receiving my half in the post.
Interestingly, I explored sound in a short drawing on my scroll earlier this week.
I have also had an email conversation with Riebeek Museum – Chris Murphy
My walking along the rail also opened up other thoughts around how this area might have looked before the rail, before farming and colonialisation. I can imagine that the air would be pungent with the scent of wild Buchu, Rhus (Searsia), and various renosterbos plants. It would have been a chaotic and diverse shurbland diverse with wildflowers and bulbs in Spring. Trees would be little on this shale soil at the foot of the mountains. The valley must have been a massive highway for migratory animals like the black maned cape lions and spotted hyenas. In the mountains baboons and leopard would also thrive and herds of Quagga, Eland, Cape buffalo would be grazing.
I imagine the valley not as a carpet of crops, but as a vast, rolling sea of grey-green shrubs, punctuated by these dark, sturdy “islands” of Wild Olive and Karee. These clumps were the hubs of life: for birds and mulch for the soil. This makes the walking connection with the old Wild Olive grove so profound as I view them with so much respect. They are silent survivors of a messy ecology