RESERVOIR presents a new a solo exhibition by Bella Knemeyer
Bella Knemeyer in studio, photography credit: Jonathan Kope
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RESERVOIR presents Here, there and everywhere, a solo exhibition by South African artist Bella Knemeyer. The opening event took place on Thursday, 13 February 2025, and the exhibition runs until 28 March 2025.
Enclosed is an excerpt of the exhibition text, The promise of repair by Hedley Twidle.
At some point in the last ten years, human-made things – infrastructure, concrete, metals, asphalts, aggregates, plastics and all the rest – began to exceed the combined weight of all biomass on earth. Exactly where you place the crossover point depends: are we counting only things constructed (bridges, roads, buildings)? Or also the waste left behind after their making: mine dumps, tailings, landfill, scrapyards, piles of rubble? In 1900 (scientists estimate) human-made stuff clocked in at 3% of organic matter (everything from trees to tundra, cattle to plankton). Today human civilization weighs in at 1,1 trillion metric tonnes (the more conservative estimate). A million million tonnes, that is, pressing down on the earth’s crust, present and future.
Bella Knemeyer, Pine (detail), 2025, Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas, 159.5 x 106cm, price on request, ENQUIRE
In Bella Knemeyer’s work, panels of mulched paper are scored with fine striations or imbued with a delicate mesh. On shelves in her studio are pebbles of granite, dirty whitish and speckled with black grains. Or at least this is what I took them for, until I pick one up and find it unaccountably light. Also formed of papier-mâché, mixed with slate chips picked up from the railway that runs to Simonstown (where her studio is located, looking over the station, the naval dockyards and the glittering metal sheet of False Bay beyond). There are also delicate arrangements of wire with fulcrums, counterweights, like scales or seesaws; and cylinders (also paper) hanging down like those from an old pendulum clock. The combined mass of this entire body of work, I imagine, would be negligible. Even when including the small grey panels pitted with imperfections and scored with wire: portable diptychs and triptychs of concrete that remind you just how beautiful this material can be.
Bella Knemeyer solo exhibition, Installation shot, courtesy of RESERVOIR
‘Materials change shape as they travel from geological deposit or forest or factory and design project to landfill’ – so writes Jane Hutton in Reciprocal Landscapes, her attempt to move back and forth between distant production site and designed landscape, to trace itineraries of the things that make up our profoundly altered world: ‘Where did they come from? What are the social and ecological conditions of their manufacture? Who made them? What is left in their place?’ The exponential growth of the built environment across the 20th and 21st centuries – an irruption of technosphere into biosphere – has happened largely within living memory (particularly following the so-called Great Acceleration post-second world war, with its large-scale adoption of concrete, crude oil derivatives and asphalt). We live within its consequences at every turn; yet somehow it is hard to believe, to imagine or take as entirely real.
Bella Knemeyer, This world should be more wonderful, 2025, Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas, 130 x 100cm, price on request, ENQUIRE
The unthinkable weight of this world historical process – its complex and unceasing flows of extraction, fabrication, deconstruction, beneficiation, displacement, dumping and disposal – haunts Knemeyer’s work, but in a subtle, sublimated way. The quiet delicacy of her panels and maquettes exist in an inverse or indexical relation to the flows they point to: the frenzied demolition and construction in capitalist core nations or growing urban hubs.
For the full text please visit Reservoir.
Bella Knemeyer, Pine (detail), 2025, Mulched paper with acrylic on canvas, 159.5 x 106cm, price on request, ENQUIRE
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