QG Focus: Woven Passages Elmari Steyn

Exhibition dates: Mar 20 – 31, 2025

Artist Statement

Printmaking is a solitary state of existence, a way of simply breathing and being part of a tranquil process and a slow, intimate journey.

This body of work is a complex framework of composite copper-plate etchings. These plates are often found or hand-cut, etched, aquatinted, then printed and overprinted, with added chine-collé and hand-colouring. Specks of 23k gold leaf suggest the gentle flow of time and fragility of all things living. Plates are used as words and symbols, often repeated, to narrate stories and sometimes to convey a specific happening within a story.

The selection of works for Woven Passages represents fragments of stories, beliefs and every-day happenings amongst a small band of people; told through depicting the trees, boats, houses, lands, and countries they lived in and travelled through.