“One night a man-sized seahorse appeared in my bed. I decided to make this man-sized seahorse, hoping that he would then get out of my bed,” says artist Beth Armstrong, Art South Africa’s fourteenth Bright Young Thing for 2009. Her master’s exhibition, Hippocampus, evolved into sculptures of the shadows cast by the original seahorse. One of the sculptures will appear at the Johannesburg Art Fair (26-28 March) and the rest in a solo exhibition in Cape Town.

The striking steel sculptures float suspended in the air, grow out of the ground and hang on the walls. The lighting casts shadows on the floors in an intricate layering of shadow sculptures casting their own shadows. Purposefully playing with the tension between 3D and 2D, she exposes the human tendency to want to recognise form and fix meaning.

Getting the image of a man-sized seahorse in her bed was as disconcerting to her as to everyone else. Not a dream, or a vision, and she is amused when people try to rationalise or ask her to explain the symbolism behind it. “If we want to call it a dream space, we can. Are spaces of the imagination mappable?,” she asks. “What I’m saying, is maybe not” she answers with a laugh. Armstrong talks with her whole body, her hands lit up against the black exhibition room. She describes the process of welding to a curious young visitor, tackling imaginary steel in the air.

“I’m in continual conflict”, Armstrong says, “it’s quite ironic, by speaking about my work I’m fixing its meaning, although the work itself is trying to say that meaning is fluid”. She has heard many proposals from visitors, who described the sculptures as “ice-cream cones, dragon tails, a saxophone”. Armstrong laughs, “I think it comes from our compulsion to name things, to make them more tangible for us”.

Born in Nelspruit (1985), a young Armstrong knew she was “going to do art”, a phrase that captures her practical approach to her work. She graduates from Rhodes University with Masters in Fine Art in April this year. She will be based in Cape Town, as the iArt Gallery has contracted her to be one of their gallery artists. When this ‘bright young thing’ considers her artistic future, she remembers that “a whole exhibition grew from the visit of a man-sized seahorse, and I stop worrying”. And with her unique approach to creating art, so she should.

  • Caeri Dunnel

Armstrong’s Hippocampus originally installed at the 1820 Settler’s Monument, Rhodes University, will be travelling to iArt Gallery in Cape Town in April 2010.

view installation of Hippocampus at Rhodes University, March 2010

Installation views of Hippocampus at the 1820 Settler’s Monument, Rhodes University, March 2010.


Installation view of Hippocampus at the 1820 Settler’s Monument, Rhodes University, March 2010.