Landscape Installations
Artwork Portfolio
2020 - 2021
Excavating Landmarks: Navigating Self
Pienaar’s artworks during 2020 and 2021 predominantly consisted of work completed for her Master’s Degree in Fine Art. This equated to one large experiential and immersive landscape installation with the following as conceptual underpinning:
During her master’s study, she wanted to utilise her leather-work and focus on identity, the experiential, and the embodied to create a space where the viewer could, themselves, experience a similar landscape to the one in which she grew up and, ultimately, bring their own conceptions and beliefs to the space. Pienaar created two installations which spanned two floors at the FADA Gallery, where the viewer would move from what she called a ‘forest-like’ space to an immersive ‘field’ installation downstairs.
Here, she focused on how the viewer would move through the simulated environments, which, to her, was synonymous with how we would move through our lives and the spaces that surround us. Pienaar was particularly interested in the continuous movement between the conscious and the subconscious as we subconsciously absorb our environments and our movement through them, but it is only when we try to make sense of them that we consciously map out these sites and our experiences of them. We plot out movements throughout our lives with metaphorical landmarks which, to her, in her investigation of Self, manifested in specific sites, smells, textures and sounds, but it is only through the conscious investigation of it that she was able to, firstly, identify them and, secondly, manifest them in physical entities - landmarks.
