Ontogenesis 4

SHORT BIO

Elfriede Dreyer is a South African conceptual, intermedial artist, curator, and mentor. She has held several solo exhibitions (in South Africa and France) and participated in group exhibitions at major galleries, museums, universities, and art festivals, both locally and internationally. Her work is included in the public collections of UP, Unisa, Telkom, DBSA, FNB, and various private collections. After 25 years of full-time teaching at the University of Pretoria and Unisa, she has been affiliated with Unisa as an Extraordinary Professor of Art since 2015. She is the Vice-President of the South African National Association for Visual Arts and is internationally recognised as a curator. Her publications have appeared in both local and international academic journals and books, contributing to her NRF rating in 2012.

Composite (2025)

Elfriede Dreyer

ARTIST STATEMENT

This new series of work has moved away from my previous working with my piano as object and further explores the transmutation of sound into words, images into sound, and words into images. I am both composing and producing the sound on/in my piano. The focus here is on landscape, viewed as a sentient entity—one whose language is received through the senses of sight, sound, and spatial awareness. As a negotiation between presence and absence, silence and resonance, the intersection of sound and image becomes a composite palimpsest of sensory impressions and meanings. Such sensory translation takes on particular urgency in the context of deafness, where sign language functions as both metaphor and method. Situated within the discourse of the Anthropocene, my intermedial practice engages with the entangled consequences of human activity on ecological and geological systems. I consider land not only as a site of environmental crisis, but also as a palimpsest—a repository of memory, transformation, and deep time. Within this conceptual framework, I draw on the archetypal duality of mother and father as foundational principles in nature: the maternal is evoked through soil, earth, and cycles of nurture and regeneration; the paternal through stone, structure, and endurance. Rock, in particular, operates as both witness and archive—inscribed with the temporal pressures of geological formation and anthropogenic disruption. Through this lens, my work seeks to open new territories of meaning-making between body, environment, and time.