Wind Dance

Medium: Six colour lithograph, 35 panels adhered to fabric base
Size:  97 x 164 cm
Edition size: 35

"Wind Dance is a composite print of 35 multi-colour lithograph prints adhered to a cotton backing with wheat starch paste. This print was exciting to work on as I approached the image by breaking it down into smaller compositions instead of thinking of it as one. Previously, when working on composite prints, I have treated the painting and building of the image as a single frame, working on one large plate, that later gets divided into panels during editioning. For Wind Dance I treated every panel as its own image, working on separate plates for each. I painted with a calligraphy brush onto clear-grained film, then exposed it onto photo-litho plates.

The tree is a mountain waterberry from the Motlatse (previously Blyde) River Canyon in Mpumalanga, South Africa. I was drawn to the rhythm and character of this slow-growing tree, bonsaied by its montane niche between rocks, battered by natural lightning fires and the weather. Over the last year, I have been running a volunteer program to remove alien invasive pine trees that have escaped from industrial timber plantations into the canyon grasslands. Doing this work, I have come across wild and remote places that feed into my artistic mind. The pines grow much faster than South African tree species, rapidly outshading them and other native plants. They also degrade the water retention capability of the grassland and worsen droughts and floods for areas further down the catchment. I wish to see a time one day when the pines are gone so the waterberries can dance again in peaceful isolation." Simon Attwood, 2025