Meditations on resentment

Miné KLEYNHANS (Bloemfontein)

Meditations on resentment

Cherrywood, brass, sand and found objects

70 cm x 43 cm x 74 cm

Biography

Miné Kleynhans is employed at the University of the Fee State’s Art Gallery as the Project Coordinator. As an artist, art project manager, and facilitator, she has participated in various experimental, developmental and large-scale international creative projects. Most notably as a lead artist in collaboration with Alex Rinsler in the It's My City project (www.itsmycity.co.za) during the Vrystaat Art Festival 2016. She graduated with a Master in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from the University of the Free State in 2017 and was an artist in residence at Brashnar Creative Project, Macedonia, Eastern Europe, in 2018. She exhibits regularly and has received various acknowledgements for her work.

Synopsis

Meditations on Resentment imagines an intimate personal ritual that sanctions the experience and expression of resentment. The work contemplates resentment as a pattern of thought and emotion that excavates, polishes, and sharpens. This interactive work invites the viewer to engage in a ritual with this secret and suppressed emotion by imaginatively and temporarily lifting the constraints that resentment is ordinarily dealt with. When encountering the artwork, prospective participants are presented with the shiny, indented surface of the work, a brush with a sharpened end and a bowl of sand. The ritual that the artwork imagines tasks the participant to kneel in front of the work and pour the sand out onto the indented surface. They are to write their resentments in the sand with the sharpened end of the brush, then sweep the sand away and out of the closest cavity until the sharp, hard kernel of a brass thorn is revealed. Participants will repeat this ritualistic activity while meditating on the reasons for their irate state as many times as their resentment requires, starting at the top of the work and working the sand downwards so that it can be collected in the brass bowl again. In time the defacement caused by the scratched words will create a stigmata-like impression of partially revealed resentments.