Marking a moment / Limited edition by Balekane Legoabe

The young and remarkable Balekane Legoabe recently joined us for a fruitful residency at the 50ty/50ty studio. Involving five days of hard work, sharing ideas and skills, and serendipitous moments and encounters, the residency offered just the kind of collaborative environment we love, and the results – our latest release – demonstrate this confluence of factors wonderfully.

Legoabe is particularly interested in the interdependent relationships between humanity and the natural world, and the parallel experiences that characterise both. She somehow works in two timeframes at once: marking particular moments in human stories and simultaneously speaking to a much deeper, ancient sense of time.

The 50ty/50ty screen print “Diagrams of the beginning” exemplifies this approach; it’s a beautiful marker of that week in the studio – and alludes to two happenings in particular.One was the announcement of the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year winners, where the chosen images were both exquisite and sobering in their depictions of the human impact on the ethereal beauty of the ocean. At the same time, we were rediscovering the visual essay The Moon as Shoe, a compilation of 19th century San drawings, fascinating artworks infused with ambiguous meaning, resonant both of Legoabe’s thematic intentions and visual language, which takes many of its cues from ancient rock art.

Immersed within these contexts, Legoabe created numerous gestural ink drawings of
creatures and forms, which were then cut up and rearranged into a new composition. This
composite image was then applied to three different screens at three different exposures, each then printed as different opacity of red ochre, resulting in this poetic overlap of earth, ocean and the inevitable mark of man.