ABOUT
Exploring Africa, capturing the line: five decades of immersive creativity.
Robert Slingsby is a contemporary abstract visual artist from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work spans painting, sculpture, and drawing.
Over fifty years, he has undertaken immersive fieldwork across Africa, documenting communities, landscapes, and rock art that inspire his unique visual language. His art is a reflection of personal experience, observation, and a lifelong pursuit of the line that drives his creativity.
"My unique creative perspective has evolved over 50 years of self-funded immersive fieldwork to remote communities across the African continent. It has shaped my art, which reflects my love for the geometry in the Richtersveld rock art. My obsession with the desert, its integrity, the solitude and space which heals, frees me of the pleasure and pain of life as an artist, allows me to chase 'the line', which fuels my creativity, the line I see in Africa's art, from antiquity to contemporary.
My career has involved a series of ‘deep dives’ to remote places inhabited by communities, including the Richtersveld Nama, the Himba in Namibia and many communities in East Africa’s Omo Valley. My art accesses material that is entirely from my own photographic documenting and first-hand experiences and observations, involving countless field trips."
"My perspectives are my own, and the material I have documented is referenced in my art. I do not intend to represent another's culture, nor act as a voice for those I meet. Through the decades, I have witnessed diminishing access to land for the locals, expanding mines and farms, forced removals and far-reaching neglect and destruction of the rock art. Witnessing the ongoing destruction of the rock art and the marginalisation of the inhabitants of the Richtersveld, undeniably, descendants of the rock artists, is inextricably woven into my art. My insights are those of a documenter, not opinions, not as historian, nor custodian, nor archaeologist, nor anthropologist, nor scientist, but as artist, steeped in the world around me.
The art I create is a mirror of my life experiences, my observations, my loves and my mind. I've used a multi-disciplinary creative approach, from painting, bronze, monumental sculptures in stone, wood, steel and glass, to charcoal drawings."
