About the Project

Pauline Borton Visual Artist & Visual Journalist – Project Description

I create artwork which deals with the loss and displacement arising from a nomadic lifestyle and the implications of this on defining ‘’home’’ within Johannesburg. I explore ‘representational space’ and am intrigued by safe spaces, both tangible and intangible.

A safe space is often represented as an enclosed place. By contrast, in my work I deal with how to represent spatial experience, which negotiates the margins between real and imagined, and focuses on abstract emotions.

‘’Home” became a central concept in understanding my place in South Africa. It framed almost every concept I explored for my BA Visual Arts (Honours). The evolution of this concept of “Home” can be tracked through my prolific visual journaling and theoretical research, which was eventually distilled into two key bodies of work: the projects ‘’Dream Home’’ and ‘’Trace Memories of JAG’’(Johannesburg Art Gallery).

As part of my ongoing practice, I continue to archive these journals and make new ones to generate new narratives which I will combine in future. I am still fascinated by the role of the imagination in defining feelings about space, place and this informs my daily practice as a creative person, visual journalist, researcher, and archiver. It strongly influences my lifestyle and all that I learn about.

As a result of being thrown into a pandemic influenced world, I had to develop creative strategies for coping with isolation and fear, to visualise the unspeakable, to search for hope through drawings & mapping and  to re-imagine a new future and to ground me in my current reality. This is how I started a new artistic journey in 2020 which brings me to where I am today.

My ongoing journey is fostering connection and respect between self and natural world, to nurture daily rituals and practices associated with healing, wellbeing, healthy sustainability, and regeneration.

I can feel a strong connection between myself and the natural world that holds me. I am living with the land, learning from the land and being in a community. I am grounding, observing, and making stories, artworks and healing spaces. A myth or a story widens my world view, a foray in a forest humbles me and quietens my mind and an artistic process empowers me to seek agency within manmade chaos.

I made a promise to myself as I embarked on this journey, my own manifesto founded in a reverence for nature. A daily practice that works towards the flexible, adaptive, and innovative. Moving forward with as much honesty and integrity as I can muster each day, and lead by example, leaving a good and true legacy behind. Daily I embrace fear, and am reminded to think relationally and connect or make connections. Some days I have to dig deep, but incremental growth is better than no growth or growing too quickly. My artistic growing practices are tethers between the real, imagined, the now and the then, and they keep me grounded and present. 

Pauline Borton

The more I practice my own manifesto, the more I learn about my world. We are co-evolutionary, and interdependent on a web of communication I can only begin to imagine.

I am a part of a highly complex network (past, present, & future). This is why the image of mycelium has captured my imagination. The metaphor of a mycelial network evolved and I use it to explore my relationship to the world around me. I meditate on both natural networks and social networks during my artmaking processes. These marks I make, mimic nature’s patterns which are a guiding force in coming to terms with who I am in this world, where my roots are, where I fit into an eco-system, and understanding how deeply connected we are to things we cannot see or touch.

There are very practical reasons to develop a reverence for mycelia & mushrooms which include their place in our ecosystem, in the soil food web, and as powerful natural forces that can create conditions for decay, decomposition, dissolving and regeneration, which are vital actions for all life.

Mycelia are everywhere, they stitch our earth together – the surface upon which our feet stand. They are almost invisible, and often we only see the fruiting bodies of mushrooms that appear on the ground alongside us.