Nellien Brewer - Artist

I grew up in an Afrikaans Christian family on an isolated farm in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As a child, I unquestioningly accepted the faith of my family. At boarding school and later university, I drifted away from the Christian teachings I had grown up with, although this was not really a conscious choice. I never considered myself to be anything but a Christian, but in retrospect I had subconsciously absorbed different ideas so that my own worldview became somewhat muddled.

I enrolled for the Visual Arts degree at the University of South Africa (UNISA) quite late in life, after practicing as a Landscape Architect for about 20 years. When I was in my second year of the Visual Arts degree, my father passed away. At the same time our family farm was lost in a land claim, and my brother and his family left South Africa primarily as a result of crime. This shaking of my foundations caused me to look at life from a different perspective. Suddenly I had very little interest in making ‘art for arts’ sake’. My father had been a very devout man, and I started to explore the beliefs I had grown up with but had rebelled against as a teenager. At UNISA we were discouraged from working with ‘sentimental’ topics such as religion and family. So, in trying to find a way to explore the loss and grief without becoming sentimental, I started experimenting with the use of Scripture using transparent glue on transparent sheets of plastic. The text was visible only when activated by light. Although I had started working with Scripture from an emotional place, I loved the visual and conceptual results, and so did the lecturers.

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The following year I wanted to continue my exploration of text as a medium, but I struggled to justify the theme conceptually. The book ‘Darwin’s Black Box’ by Michael J Behe led me to start exploring natural complexity and the concepts of evolution versus creation. At this time I started working with digital text which turned out to be more appropriate than handwriting for exploring themes of complexity.

When I was explaining my proposed concept at a crit session, one of the lecturers rather irritably suggested that I should ‘Stay away from the grandiose concepts, and start at the beginning!’

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