The bones were always there, artist Joni Brenner says.
As a master’s in fine arts student at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, known as Wits, Joni had a campus studio that overlooked Braamfontein Cemetery, where the first graves were dug in the 1880s. As she worked on her thesis about the relationship between portraiture – her abiding interest – and death, she made two small paintings of her cemetery view.
We have another small painting she made about that time, in the early ‘90s, when we first met her. Our painting in hues both earthy and fleshy shows an ink bottle cap stacked on a glass brick, which in turn is stacked on a clay brick. The humble objects are rendered in paint laid on thick and fleshy, as is often Joni’s wont, on an 18-by-6 inch canvas. It’s a small image packed with meaning. It looks like a cenotaph.
Joni's interest in the relationship between portraiture and the passing of time first drew her to the Taung Child, the name scientists gave to three fossilized fragments of the skull of a child who died 2.5 million to 2.8 million years ago in what is now South Africa. The discovery of the bones, now preserved at Wits, helped scientists trace human origins to Africa.
In the early 2000s, Joni began making portraits of the fossil that help us see that a child who could have been an ancestor once lived -- loved, played, was mourned. Joni's first Taung Child portraits were created in the Fossil Primate Hominid Laboratory at the Wits Medical School. A quarter century later, the development over time of her figurative and abstract Taung Child paintings, sculpture and ideas are traced in the show “Impact” at the Origins Centre.
The Origins Centre, a Wits museum devoted to research and engagement with the evolution of life, stands on the site of the building where Joni once had her master’s studio, and has the same view of Braamfontein cemetery she had.
For the solo show, which is akin to a retrospective, Joni added temporary walls and veiled windows in the Origins Centre’s exhibition space. The result allows viewers to feel they are making discoveries in an anthropological dig.
We think of discoveries emerging as researchers painstakingly remove millennia of dirt and dust using dental tools and paint brushes. But the Taung Child was thrown up as quarry workers blasted away at a site in South Africa. It was by chance that the skull emerged fairly intact and made its way to researchers.
On a tour of the show she calls an "in-depth artistic response to a scientific object," Joni led a discussion of chance, violence, loss, vulnerability, process, observation, storytelling, effort, the codependency of creation and destruction, questions with and without answers.
It is, Joni says, also an exhibition about a concern that artists and scientists share: the question of "what has to be risked or given up in order to move forward."
In a series of self portraits in the exhibit, Joni can be seen with her chin resting on her fist. The portraits are rendered in the powerfully unreliable medium of watercolor -- you never know where the drips will lead.
Amanda Esterhuysen, an archaeologist who headed the Origins Centre at the time, was convinced one of the self portraits depicted a child's femur and knee, and could not unsee that discovery even when Joni pointed out the contours of her face and clenched hand.
Putting the show together helped Joni see the threads of her work and how they came together, and to contemplate how artists can't always control the narrative.
The bones of her practice and preoccupations are also there in our concise cenotaph painting.