Ed Cross is delighted to present A Sum of Days, a solo exhibition by British-Guyanese artist Ann Gollifer at 19 Garrett Street, EC1Y 9TY from 17 May – 10 June 2023.
Gollifer (b. 1960 Guyana) has lived and worked in Botswana since 1985. Her practice includes painting, print-making, writing and photography. This is her first exhibition with Ed Cross.
The complex entanglements of history, place, identity and belonging are at the heart of Ann Gollifer’s work. Her art draws on her South American, British and African heritage, and their shared histories of conquest and colonialism. Gollifer makes her watercolour paint herself, using earth pigments collected from around Botswana.
Gollifer will show a series of 23 watercolour paintings on vintage watercolour paper that were originally bound together in book form. The pages offered her a perfect ground for exploring Botswana ochre and the relationships between their colour ranges and textures.
Working from her garden on the outskirts of Gaborone, where the wild meets the cultivated, Gollifer mixes her ochre pigments herself, grinding and processing them into watercolour paint. She uses concentric lines of graphite on top of the ochre pigments, like contours of a map, signifying a spatial location for all the images in the works. They also reference fingerprints and personal identities.
Gollifer’s collection of Botswana ochres is facilitated by Mma Motsie Nkwemabala, a traditional mural painter and healer. She has taken Gollifer to her collection sites where she makes ochre cakes for her own use. Gollifer also buys Letsoku from traders in ochre cosmetics. Letsoku is a finely ground ochre in a wide range of colours from cream to yellow, orange, red, rich brown, pinks and purple. These powders are traditionally used as face powders to smooth, varnish and beautify skin.
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Ann Gollifer (b. 1960 Guyana) has lived and worked in Gaborone, Botswana since 1985. A multidisciplinary artist, her own navigation of identity informs much of her work: she was born in a remote part of Guyana to British and Warao-Arawak parents, who travelled and worked widely during her childhood, and completed a Masters in History of Art at Edinburgh University (1983). An Artist member of the Thapong Visual Art Centre, Gaborone, Gollifer was part of the founding executive committee. Gollifer has exhibited in multiple group and solo shows across multiple countries, and her work has been collected by the British Museum, the National Museum of Botswana and the Triangle International Art Workshops amongst others. In South Africa she has worked with printmakers Mark Attwood and Joe Legate and has exhibited at CIRCA Johannesburg (2011) and Everard Read (2009). Solo shows include Guns & Rain (2020), and she has exhibited at 1-54, London (2021), Untitled Art, Miami (2020) and Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2019, 2020 and 2022). She has recently completed a long-term book-art project about her roots in Guyana. Gollifer is one of the finalists for the Sacatar Foundation residency award 2023, taking place in the Bahia state in Brazil.