Notes

Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles was exhibited as part of Vivienne Koorland’s solo show in
2007 at the Freud Museum in London titled Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes). Taking its title from Freud’s correspondence to his family in 1908 in which he described the attendant anxiety that accompanied his journey as a tourist to Blackpool, Reisemalheurs represents Koorland’s own grappling with the dislocation from any fixed notion of home.

After graduating from UCT in 1978 she moved to Berlin where she attended the Hochschule der Kunste and later to Paris to study at the Ecole Normale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. Settling in New York in 1982 and travelling frequently between Cape Town resulted in an itinerant identity where the modes and technologies of global movement have become core to her investigations.

Her paintings function as palimpsests where text merges with images on top of recycled materials such as a heavy, stitched burlap which forms the metaphorically loaded ground upon which these works are set. Explaining the origins of her cartographic works, Koorland notes “My map paintings began in 1994, when Apartheid ended and names changed”. Describing the conceptual process behind Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles, she continues “DF Malan Airport, symbolized by the plane icon in the center of this aerial-view, was one of the first. Point of no return, it memorialized an Afrikaner Nationalist, an architect of Apartheid. But, were it not for that moment of re-naming, I wouldn’t have had to retrieve it from the dustbin of history to put it on my map”.¹

William Kentridge, who has collaborated with Koorland in Conversations in Letters and Lines at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2016, has noted: “What she does in her paintings is not only to note the metaphor but to try to mine the emotion itself. This is done through the activity of painting. It is in the paint itself, its layering and its removal, its re-painting, the sewing together of fragments of canvas, the washing out of the material, continuing until (sometimes after years) the scarifying of the canvas has plumbed the feeling behind it and earned the place name on its surface”.²

1. Mark Godfrey in Conversation with Vivienne Koorland, in Tamar Garb. (2007) Reisemalheurs. London: The Freud Museum.
2. William Kentridge, ‘Painting Maps’, in Tamar Garb. (2007) Reisemalheurs. London: The Freud Museum.

Exhibited

Freud Museum, London, Reisemalheurs, 22 March to 29 April 2007.