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SENTENCES :
VISUAL LANGUAGE CODES AND SERIES

Jeannette Unite
Firedancer

Firedancer
Jeannette Unite
Firedancer series Sentences
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Flight Sentence
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Flight Sentence
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Flight Sentence
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Internal Mask
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Violent sentence
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Music language 02
Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Music language 01
Jeannette Unite
Firedancer Sentence
Jeannette Unite
Firedancer Triptych House Morris



I was intrigued by a fire dancer in the night creating arcs and
whorls that looked calligraphic. This connection of the fire dancing
to writing is explored in a number of SENTENCES series.
Jeannette Unite
Stralizia Abstract multi panelled

SENTENCES THE VISUAL HANDWRITING
In my art-making, mark-making is important. Like making good food the ingredients count.’ Gestures and marks are the building blocks of Jeannette Unite’s work. I like to make varied, fluid marks, I like sensuality of surface. There must be contrast and tension in the marks to achieve visual drama. And then the energy of the mark-making must be appropriate to the meaning of the work.’

As Jeannette frequently works in an abstract or quasi-abstract manner, the mark making becomes the vehicle for meaning. Working in an abstract idiom has been a way for her to secretively describe a narrative –one that can only be interpreted through gestures and marks, not read in images.

These Seven Panelled Pieces (Opposite) are in collections such as Swiss;Re, Devs, Vodacom; Clifford Chance Law firm; Old Mutual; Annenberg
Bell Roberts Jeannette Unite
Bell Roberts Exhibition Animation 7 Television sets of Sentences Video


National Gallery South Africa installing Sentences With Caz

In Old Studio with Sentences

Flight Sentence DEVS


Foyer House Ryan
Old Mutual Meeting room JHB HQ 
SENTENCES...................................................................................
These series of linked paintings, grouped in strips of seven, developed from sequencing collages like an animation strip. When Unite recognized the calligraphic nature of the marks, she began to explore elements of familiar and unintelligible alphabets. It is intended that the viewer sense meaning through the quality, speed and urgency of the mark. Visual Language is referred to as each series is conceived as a visual sentence. The seven paintings, like words, are separate and yet linked. There is a connecting matrix of theme, colour and gesture. The number seven takes on a special significance. It is for example, a number signifying completion –like seven days in a week.
Then there is a play on the word ‘sentence’, for in some respects the artist sees herself as having served a metaphorical sentence of imprisonment to the memory and repercussions of the past.
REVISITING EXPERIENCE .............................................................
Some of the work, like that which deals with the 1992 attack Unite experienced in which she was stabbed, bound and burgled and survived, is about revisiting moments of extreme experience. Oliver Sacks suggests that ‘the disposition to recollect comes with changes and separations from people, places and events and situations - especially of great significance – deeply loved or hated. ‘
Oliver Sacks (An Anthropologist on Mars)
Interested in the notion of nostalgia. Jeannette Unite suggests that we edit and re edit ourselves with visually recollected fragments of our past, creating our own personal narratives.’ She understands memory to be a subjective construct of the present. The Notion of memory as fluid as an aspect of the three components of her own work is that it is a psychological space to locate space, to embrace pain as well as pleasure and always to find a way through to wholeness and self healing. And to me the pleasure of Jeannette’s painting is that this is done with a delectable, generous, and appetizing mess and smudge and smear and tracery of paint ink or charcoal. A felt maneuvering between spontaneity and control, abandonment and restraint, spillage and the damning of both materials and feelings.

Jeannette Unite South Africa Art
Drawings post attack 1992
Jeannette Unite art
Jeannette Unite walks her dogs regularly on table mountain and one day she found an incredible cave like the mouth of a tunnel.It seemed like a mysterious and mystical place that struck me with tremendous resonance and I took photographs. Later I revisited it with a group of art students and we wrapped it with a hundred metres of fabric. Christo style. It was an act of transformation.

        
Sentences Visual Language refers to categorization and codes or language systems reinforced by the idea fo a handwriting out of focus
 
Nostalgia Mixed media drawing ............................Stralizia Mixed Media drawing .......................Memory Venice .................
  SENTENCES  
 

Anne Graaff wrote of Jeannette Unite (March 2001) Sentences refers to her story about repercussions of certain painful experiences in the past. As she expresses it. ‘The work explores both enchainment to the past and liberation from it. The title came out of a Thupela workshop at the National Gallery in Cape Town. As artists work alongside each other a dialogue spontaneously develops –Jeannette was playing with collage and then sequencing separate collages like frames in an animation strip. One of the international artists at the workshop, Chris Cozier, from Trinidad, recognized the calligraphic nature of the work – ‘like handwriting out of focus, he said. And the idea for a new exhibition was born.