Create a Meaningful World Through Art

It is significant that I have my Born Free portrait (left in photo) on show in Durban. I graduated from the Durban University of Technology in the 1980`s and was awarded New Signatures Award at the NSA Gallery. More recently I was awarded the Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize in 2006 whilst completing my MVA in Australia. This feels like a full circle of time.

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Why do stories matter to museums and how can museums become better storytellers? Inspiring context for future Museum Art intervention projects

Why do stories matter to museums and how can museums become better storytellers? Stories are universal. We all read, watch and listen to them. We all tell them. Stories are part of what makes us human. So how can museums use stories successfully

It is time to reclaim my Irish ancestry https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DLvQsuq8g/

After a three-year pilot that began in 2022, the Irish government has confirmed that the Basic Income for the Arts programme will become permanent in 2026.

The scheme provides a regular weekly payment of €325 to artists and creative arts workers, helping them sustain their creative practice. From 2026, 2,000 artists will continue to receive this support, with the government signalling that the programme may be expanded over time.

The pilot has shown that income security allows artists to spend more time on creative work, reduces financial pressure, and improves overall well-being. Evaluations also indicate positive social and economic effects, highlighting the role of artists in strengthening culture and communities.

This is more than a policy decision. It demonstrates that sustained public support for artists benefits not only individuals, but society as a whole.

Sources:
Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. (2024). Basic Income for the Arts: Programme Updates and Evaluation Summary. Government of Ireland.
Oireachtas Budget Statements. (2025). Budget 2026: Cultural and Creative Sector Measures.

So true....once you migrate you can never be at home again…

There’s a strange kind of loss in coming home and finding the place you remember has vanished. Gertrude Stein, that singular figure of early twentieth-century literature, captured this feeling with a phrase that’s become shorthand for dislocation and absence. She wasn’t just lamenting a changed neighbourhood in Oakland; she was naming a deeper fracture between memory and reality, between the past we carry inside us and the world we return to.

Gertrude Stein’s words resonate today in a way that feels almost prescient. We live in a time when cities morph overnight, communities dissolve under the weight of gentrification, and digital spaces replace physical ones. The “there” we long for often evaporates before our eyes, leaving behind a ghostly echo. It’s no wonder that thinkers like Sara Ahmed, the feminist scholar and writer, explore similar terrain in her work on belonging and alienation. Ahmed talks about how spaces can feel inhospitable, how the act of trying to belong can be a kind of violence when the environment itself resists you. Stein’s reflection is a kind of early map of this emotional geography.

There’s also something deeply psychoanalytic in the way Stein’s sentiment unfolds. Contemporary psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin has written about recognition and the struggle to find oneself mirrored authentically in others and places. When the familiar disappears, what’s left is a confrontation with absence itself - a void that forces us to reckon with what we’ve lost and what remains invisible. Stein’s experience wasn’t just about a physical place but about the identity tied to that place unravelling.

Literary voices today continue to echo this theme. Writers like Maggie Nelson have blurred the lines between memoir and theory, exploring how memory is both a refuge and a trap. Nelson’s work reminds us that the “there” we seek is often tangled up with grief and desire, a shifting constellation rather than a fixed point. Stein’s insight, then, is not just about loss but about the elusive nature of home and self in a world that refuses to stay still.

In the end, Gertrude Stein’s observation is a quiet invitation to sit with discomfort, to recognize that some things we chase are shadows. It asks us to question what it means to belong, to remember, and to accept that sometimes the places we thought were anchors turn out to be mirages. That’s a lesson as urgent now as it was nearly a century ago.

Opening next Thursday on the 4th of December 2025 until January 30th, 2026.
My Crossing Over drawing/installation will be on the Nel Gallery's Summer Salon in Cape Town ~ located at 117 Long Street (corner Church Street) - if you are in Cape Town I`d love to see you
Lauryn Arnott`s artworks delve deeply into themes on women and liminality ; that state of being in between two worlds or being in a state of ambiguity and becoming. `For most of history Anonymous was a woman` (1) ; for most of Southern African history , anonymous was not only a woman but she was commonly overlooked. In this, Arnott portrays women focusing on ideas of fortitude, emotional depth and mutuality . Based on in situ as well as bibliographic and archival research her artworks open up the possibility of alternative forms of storytelling .There is no resolution to the fate of human kind. People cannot be blamed or shaped entirely by the histories that they are born into. However they are certainly inflicted by those histories.
Arnott`s Crossing Over drawing invites us to consider not just the powerful, but also the endurance of the marginalised and the lasting effect of oppression. J.M. Coetzee describes in his book, Waiting for the Barbarians; the inner life of a man who endures the moral consequences of witnessing atrocities in his country. The central woman Crossing Over is an empowered figure driven by her own inner trajectory, rather than those of the spectator.
J.M. Coetzee awarded Lauryn Arnott the 2006 Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize in a competition entitled ….. A Place in the World, for her drawing: Journey Home, at the ACU conference at the University of Adelaide, Australia. (2)
By way of drawings, painting and prints, Arnott interrogates barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts , thoughtfully shifting between private and global considerations to explore social imaginaries.
1. In her Master of Visual Arts research, Arnott brought a wealth of lived experience, combined with text based research into her studio practice, to create a significant project and drawing titled The Journey Home drawing which won the Association of Commonwealth Universities art prize, in an International competition entitled `….a place in the world`.The award was presented by South African Nobel laureate author and visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Professor John M. Coetzee. Coetzee opened Arnott`s MVA exhibition at Adelaide Central School of Art.
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Transcript from John M. Coetzee`s opening speech presented at Lauryn Arnott`s Master of Visual Art award exhibition titled CROSSING OVER , at Adelaide Central School of Art, Australia
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LinkedIn This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

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Whist walking through the National Gallery in Dehli in 2017 I discovered the amazing painting of beloved painter, Sikh/Hungarian Amrita Sher Gill

One of India's Great Painters But Suspicions Surround Amrita Sher-Gil's Very Sudden Early Death Discover the extraordinary life and art of Amrita Sher-Gil, one of India’s most celebrated and pioneering modern artists. This video explores how Sher-Gil br...

François-Auguste-René Rodin (1840–1917) was the one sculptor whose work might be put on a par with Michelangelo's. Although he is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past. He was schooled traditionally, took a craftsman-like approach to his work, and desired academic recognition, although he was never accepted into Paris's foremost school of art.

Sculpturally, Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Many of his most notable sculptures were roundly criticized during his lifetime. They clashed with the predominant figure sculpture tradition, in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin's most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory, modeled the human body with realism, and celebrated individual character and physicality. Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, but refused to change his style. Successive works brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.

Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion. Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism of the Greeks, and the decorative beauty of the Baroque and neo-Baroque movements. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay of light and shadow. To a greater degree than his contemporaries, Rodin believed that an individual's character was revealed by his physical features.

See also this other current gallery in the series:
* Michelangelo -- MWW Great Sculptors #1