Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / SEPTEMBER 2022
Michele Rolstone
South Africa
www.michelerolstone.com
About
South African artist and printmaker, Michele Rolstone, holds
a BAFA from the Michaelis School for Fine Art, University of
Cape Town. Rolstone trained and worked as a professional
printmaker in Cape Town for a number of years before
moving to Johannesburg, joining the artist community of
August House. Although trained in traditional printmaking,
her practice is at its core interdisciplinary and experimental.
Looking to the tradition of storytelling as a form of knowledge
transfer, Rolstone sees her recent works as texts, adapting
mythologies for the contemporary context. She reflects on
the relationship between personal and collective experience
and the process of locating the self within, and in relation
to, the zeitgeist. She uses symbols to write subtexts into her
work, and is deeply fascinated with the way in which meaning
becomes ever more complex and layered over time through
a process of diverse and repetitive interpretation. She hopes
that using familiar symbolic references will serve as visual
cues for interpretive participation and co-creation.
Of obvious profundities
Some experiences are hard to put plainly to words. It is
already a difficult task, conjuring the imaginations of others,
to relate any experience that was not lived alongside you.
Even then it is layered, with each present perception bringing
nuance to that which is perceived.
Perhaps it is because some experiences are not meant
to be well understood. Intellectualised and reduced for
consumption. Perhaps some experiences are meant, rather,
to be well experienced. Embodied and integrated in a way
that needs no explanation.
It seems an obvious thing, in the way obvious things
often aren’t. Even more so when we are too distracted
or overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel like the profundity of
a message, when the lightbulb finally flickers “on”, lies
precisely in the obvious; in finally seeing the thing you were
looking at all along. I think much of my time at Arteles was
profound in this way. Freed from distraction and coming off
of notable overwhelm prior to arrival, it was liberatory in a
way that I wish I could share. To list the work I ‘made’ or
‘did’ there would be missing the point a bit for me. Instead, I
will marvel at the differences in the shared experiences that
intersecting paths in time and place will produce.