Solo Exhibition
18 September - 2 November 2024

Exhibition Opening: Wednesday 18 September 2024
Exhibition Closure: Saturday 2 November 2024 Share Facebook Twitter

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Scribe, a solo exhibition by Lyndi Sales.

It would appear that a pattern has etched itself into Lyndi Sales’ practice over the last years. Namely, the visual orator has fine-tuned her syllabus in the teachings of plant medicine to reveal a psychic sequencing in her works. Or, perhaps she has hacked nature’s code with her large-scale spiral collages, seen continued in Scribe, her fourth solo presentation with WHATIFTHEWORLD. Sales reflects that her working process is instinctual more so than a premeditated plan and conveys that she receives patterning for her spiral collages as transmissions from sacred plant medicine rituals.

With this new body of work, the artist dips into the vast colourspace of her spiral collages to produce a delicately woven script of visual sonic frequency recordings of psychic plant life into large-scale tapestry works. Sales’ near-supernatural instinct for colour composition presents each hue as though it were an inflection by which to pronounce a single letter in her expansive visual vocabulary. Embroideries of rhizome networks, flesh-like textured drawings, intertwining vines and geometric constellations are accentuated by bespoke scent profiles composed by perfumer, Marioara de la Tzara, for this new body of work.

Scribe is in part the culmination of a three-week period Sales spent in a sacred plant ceremony with the Huni Kuin people of the Amazon rainforest in 2022. The Huni Kuin have for centuries practiced ancestral plant medicine rituals with Nixi Pae – a psychoactive brew more commonly known as “ayahuasca”. The Huni Kuin perform Nixi Pae rituals as multi-part ceremonies which include prayers, song and dance, the burning of dried medicinal herbs and a final purifying floral bath anointment. The Huni Kuin consider Nixi Pae ceremonies to be a critical practice for collective healing and spiritual growth of the community. Sales relays some of the Huni Kuin’s teachings in her new body of work in the form of large tapestries embroidered with the sonic frequencies of recorded prayer songs from the Huni Kuin plant ceremony.

Looking closer to home, Scribe includes new works on paper, which consider the archeological ruins of the circular stone enclosures of the pre-colonial Bokoni people, who can be dated back to the 16th century Mpumalanga, South Africa. Very little written history was recorded on the Bokoni, a peaceful agro-pastoral society who developed a highly advanced agricultural network drainage system connecting the stone enclosures. Seen from an aerial view, the intricate patterning of the ruins present as a visual landscape anomaly likened to that of Stonehenge.

From the 19th century onwards, the Bokoni were subject to relentless land displacement; following disputes with and, subsequent sublimation into neighbouring clans, they were further displaced by colonial occupation and finally almost completely disbanded by Apartheid forced removals. The Bokoni were predominantly written into South African historical record as an annexed society, while the stone ruins garnered more interest from international audience, some of whom published wild speculations of alien intervention as to their origins. However; recent archeological findings reveal the Bokoni to have been expert iron and steel smelters and active participants in regional trade routes. Historian enquiry has since shown the Bokoni to have been a highly sophisticated agro-pastorial society of chemists, traders and agriculturalists (Delius, Maggs & Schoeman, 2014).

Sales’ intimately worked drawings comprise organic maze-like formations, the design of which she delineates with a specialised glue that is then coated with a fine-ground pigment made from stones she collected in the Eastern and Western Cape regions. The earthy-hued maze-like drawings are slightly risen from the paper, giving the appearance of a dermographism on its surface. With these works, Sales demonstrates an instance of the sumptuous tactility of forensic history; when the land itself is etched with a people’s presence who were otherwise written out of historical record. Sales’ fleshy, maze-like formations call to the unique and vibrant visual logic of her spiral collages, subsuming the works seamlessly into her artistic oeuvre, the visual logic of which the artist credits to sacred commune with plant medicine.

Researchers from the Berkley/Imperial Psychedelic Research Program have found that the psychoactive properties of certain plant medicines can help our minds to form new neural pathways (Sheldrake 2020:122). Hence, the ingestion of such plants has been shown to help aid in the recovery from psychological trauma, as new neural pathways open up and old thought patterns are released. Sales’ new offerings with Scribe explode the brain’s cognitive function onto a visual plane, revealing potential pathways for re-mapping a collective engagement with the history of land through psychic meditation.

She reflects, “We are each a thin thread woven together as part of an unfathomable tapestry, every thread is connected to the whole. What I take and send out to the tapestry is felt by all.” Sales’ generous approach to her work can be seen in these threads; weaving embroidered tapestries, aerial cyphers and spiral collages together in such a way it were as though, collectively, these works could pronounce the unspeakable name of god.

Text by Georgia Munnik