Io Makandal’s drawings and paintings can superficially appear like doodles on a pad in a waiting room. Varying lines and marks, made by pens and pencils, are clustered and randomly composed, as if created by different people at long intervals.
Makandal’s obsession with the urban landscape explains her childlike or seemingly random stream of consciousness mark-making with disparate materials and forms bound together in the build environment. She makes this point quite literally in her solo exhibition, Entropy into a Third Landscape, at the Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg, where she has erected an installation consisting of urban and personal detritus.
Broken concrete, wire, a faux marble print and degraded gateposts are composed in an abstract installation. It also, curiously, includes a clump of cat hair over which a magnifying glass is placed – perhaps drawing attention to the way in which we privilege personal attachments or animal life.
Dubbed Caim, the installation will help visitors and admirers – she has been gaining popularity through group exhibitions – to make sense of her abstract works. They capture the fragmented nature of urban spaces and the dislocation of city life.
It may be better to think of the installation as a deconstruction of her work. Her first solo show since she graduated from Michaelis, the exhibition is designed to "educate the audience before I abstract further", says Makandal, a quirky twenty-something with a bleach-blond hairdo.
The drawings are not straightforward depictions of this installation or others she has made. She came to drawing through sculpture — plotting the pieces she wanted to make — before discovering that it allowed her to connect with her feelings about urban spaces and to map what she refers to as the third space.
She borrowed the term from Gilles Clement, a landscaping theorist interested in the ways in which uncultivated natural vegetation shaped and permeated built environments.
Clement’s ideas about the third landscape are a little more complicated than that, but the term coincided with Makandal’s fixation with weeds.
While gardeners spend their days cursing, removing and discarding unwanted plants regarded as weeds, Makandal collects them, photographs them in situ, and in this exhibition hangs one upside down as part of her installation.
Weeds embody the idea of a third landscape — an uncontrolled, natural entity regarded as a sign of the degradation of a built environment. They operate as a metaphor for the ways in which mother nature challenges humankind’s dominance, but also how organic cities can be, how humans alter them to suit their needs or to survive.
Makandal is charmed by the persistence of weeds and she found that some of them heal the soil — "they fix the nitrogen in the soil and protect the nutrients".
She views the signs of the titular entropy in a positive light. The decline of an urban setting suggests a renewal and a return to a natural state. This sense of balance and order countering chaos is a quality that defines her drawings and paintings.
Her abstraction mirrors the push-pull between the manmade and the natural, and the balance that is struck. This may explain why her art is so curiously pleasing to the eye, despite appearing random, formless and chaotic. She is a quiet master of composition.
Yet there is a playfulness to her language. It exudes a sense of liberation; she is not hung up on impressing anyone. Instead, she is letting audiences in on her exploration with lines, a journey on the borderline of the subconscious without being throttled by a clear objective.
This ties in with the way she adds torn pieces together, binding them with brown tape — expanding on her art exhibited by Kalashnikovv at the recent Cape Town Art Fair, where she tore holes in her works.
"I wanted to engage with paper as a material. I have also been fascinated with the fact that the work is never finished."
She doesn’t treat her artworks like precious objects — they can be extended, remade and perhaps even discarded, like elements in the urban environment often are.
In the short period since returning to making art (after a detour in graphic design) she has evolved a distinctive language that is fresh and playful and a new take on urban decay.
• Entropy into a Third Landscape will show at Kalashnikovv Gallery until April 3
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