2014 Tatham Art Gallery Exhibitions

Corina Lemmer: Fragile

Corina Lemmer's theme for this exhibition centres around the fragility of human beings, society and nature. Images of birds' nests symbolise our instinctive need for creating places of safety and security in a threatening world.

Threads: Celebrating Fibre Artist Jutta Faulds

Jutta Faulds - fibre artist, crafter, quilter, knitter, teacher, organiser, chemist, founding member of the Midlands Arts and Crafts Society, and friend to many, turned eighty at the end of last year.

Generous Friends

Since 1984 the Friends of the Tatham Art Gallery (FOTAG), through its ongoing fund raising efforts, have generously assisted the Gallery to acquire works for its permanent collection.

KZN Midlands Matric Art Exhibition

The Matric Art Exhibition is one of the highlights on the Gallery's exhibition schedule for the year. It always produces surprising ideas and methods from our youth who take art as a Matric subject. This year, about 15 schools from the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands region will be taking part.

Legacy Exhibition

This exhibition, curated by well known South African ceramist David Walters, pays tribute to the legacy of Juliet Armstrong as teacher and mentor of several generations of students in expanding interpretations of contemporary ceramic production in South Africa.

Developing Characters

This exhibition features 80 black-and-white portraits created by Singarum Jeevaruthnam Moodley, a.k.a. Kitty (1922-1987).

Contemplation: Animal - vegetable - mineral

You are invited to ponder on the origins, similarities and contrasts of the objects on display, all from the Gallery's permanent collection.

For Juliet: Ceramic Sculptor

Apart from memories of her maternally caring nature, her commitment to political justice for all, her inspired teaching and her love of company, good food and good wine, Juliet Armstrong left behind a body of art work which is a hugely important contribution to the visual art legacy of South Africa.

Jean Powell: A Retrospective

Jean Powell, now in her mid-80s, is an artist remembered as an active committee member of the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts, the Friends of the Durban Art Gallery and other bodies, but is less well known for her own artistic production. She has discovered, taught and helped countless young people to develop skills and talents, but few of us know the breadth of her work, nor her journey through life. This exhibition shows selected examples of her fabric works, traditional graphic works, botanic studies, calligraphy, and her collaborations with architects in vitreous enamel and etched glass.

Thami Jali: Restless Spirit

Thami Jali : Restless Spirit is an exhibition curated by Jenny Stretton from Durban Art Gallery, and celebrates a major KwaZulu-Natal artist who hails from Durban. Thami Jali's story is so much about South Africa's recent past: the fractured nation, its diverse cultures, seemingly endless journeys and the hunger for an authentic artistic home. Jali's life and work speaks of the pain and triumph of South Africa, and is intensely human and direct whilst maintaining a complex intellectual underpinning. He renders work about the grim, cold realities of the street that is optimistic and emotionally balanced. The work is beautiful, it buzzes in a way that marks it as current, contemporary, and demands the viewer's attention. The constructions are never obvious metaphors but lead us inevitably to consider the structures we've been part of for most of our lives as South Africans.