Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Lyndi Sales (b.1973) explores themes of perception and vision as well as connectivity. She strives to create in her audience a corporeal response – a feeling of being in one’s own body, to “bring people to their senses.”
Her works involves the accumulation of thousands of pieces of paper–each with its own unique colour combination, gradation, fragmented brush texture, and shape–reconfigured into an abstract composition. Sales works intuitively from the centre outwards and her palette is guided by contrasting colour combinations and spiralling compositions that come to her through experiences with plant medicine. Sales recent work heavily explores altered states of consciousness within the body, existing at the interface of art and rationalism, reason and wonder.
Her surprising combination of art and science take on new and curious configurations that often illuminate the fragile nature of our existence and temporality. In this exhibition, through the process of deconstruction, in the form of cutting up sheets of hand painted paper and found paper maps, she reassembles the fragments into abstract musings to create depictions of new territories or portals to unfamiliar and undiscovered places.
“My desire is to see with closed eyes, or rather through the veil of the everyday in the hope that other realms do exist beyond what we think we know to be true.”
Sales received both her BFA (1995) and MFA (2000) from University of Cape Town, both with distinction. Sales was a merit award winner in the ABSA Atelier. She was a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center grant and participated in residencies at the Vermont studio center as well as the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium.
She has held solo shows internationally at Galerie Maria Lund in Paris and Toomey Tourell in San Francisco. And locally in South Africa at the Goodman Gallery, Bell-Roberts Contemporary, Joao Ferreria and Gallery Momo galleries. She has participated in group shows in South Africa, USA, Austria, London, Holland and Denmark. Her works can be found in major collections in South Africa as well as collections in the USA and Europe.
