The internationally renowned artist Birgitta Volz has just arrived in Namibia to assist her friend and travel book author Konny von Schmettau with her charity in the North.
She will soon display the results of her original and unmatched work of which the print of the famous baobab with David Livingston’s signature will be the keystone.
Volz, from Nuremberg, south Germany, has been living in the south of India for 15 years in the international community of Auroville. She works with bark prints, a technique which is unique and innovative, linked to ancient traditions. She developed it herself and has received numerous awards and international recognition for her unusual work.
When Volz prints the structures of the bark with organic oil colour, she awakes another world to life. The complex technical process enables her to evoke a new dimension throughout the question of the invisible. Faces and fascinating beings show up, which we know only through age old fairy tales and stories. The trees are not harmed through the procedure and it seems that they happily collaborate with the artist.
Volz’s art work is challenging to the logical mind, because everyone will see a world which has formed almost by itself, which we think of as ‘invisible’ and it is quite obvious that these shapes cannot form by pure coincidence.
Volz is working on this project with Von Schmetteau who re-discovered with an expedition team the hidden and long forgotten signature by Livingstone in August 2016. Writing can be read on the 3 000 year-old tree called the Livingstone Baobab by the Mayeyi, the main population at Sangwali where the tree is growing.
Since Volz saw the photographs of the discovery, she dreamt of working with the hidden images in the ancient tree’s bark.
She will showcase the results of her work in Namibia at the FNCC’s Simon Lumbu Gallery in Windhoek where the ambassador of the European Union in Windhoek, Jana Hybaskova, will introduce her work.
‘The Research of the Invisible’ opens on Friday, 15 June at 17h30 and will run until 6 July.
Originally posted in The Namibian
