EASTCOAST GOLD – 2018

“The distinctiveness of Robyn Denny’s art lies in its understanding of this mix, or re-mix of times and places. If her work is centred on Africa, it is not however wholly informed by this particular continent. This is because Denny well understands the connectedness of geographies – and in particular the potent interconnectedness of land and sea, the coastal world, umland, and hinterland, and the fathomless encompassing ocean. Indeed, one could argue that Denny’s paintings are caught precisely at the littoral – the point between land and sea – and, therefore, are moved all the more profoundly by zones of contact which are equivocal and open-ended. To my knowledge no maritime historian has better articulated this point between worlds than the New Zealander, Michael Pearson. ‘Rather than look out at the oceans from the land, as so many earlier books have done, a history of an ocean has to reverse this angle and look from the sea to the land, and most obviously to the coast’, notes Pearson. ‘There has to be attention to land areas bordering the ocean, that is the littoral. A history of an ocean needs to be amphibious, moving easily between land and sea’… Denny’s focus on the Cape of Good Hope’s connectedness to the West and East, North and South, is her riposte as it were. Her adventures in painting, which has placed Africa’s Western and Eastern coastline at their centre, are one woman’s poetic rejoinder and reminder of the complex intricacies of human contact and exchange over centuries. After Fernand Braudel, hers is truly a ‘human ocean’.”  

Ashraf Jamal, excerpts from Human Ocean, catalogue essay, 2018