PRESS RELEASE
FECUND: A GARDEN OF EARTHY DELIGHT
Jul 9 – Jul 24, 2025
Everard Read presents Fecund: A Garden of Earthy Delight, curated by Clare van Zyl.
9 -24 July 2025
Fecund is a mixed media show of works created by Jann Cheifitz and Josie Grindrod. The show explores cycles of fecundity and fertility, fallow times and death, and the layered meanings of abundance. Claiming fecundity as a complex space of power and transformation, the exhibition looks at the fertile ground between the body, the garden and imagination.
Josephine Grindrod was born in Durban in 1963. She now lives in Cape Town. Situating her painting practice as an embodied, critical and generative response to found narratives, objects and images, Grindrod is interested in the imaginal as a realm allowing both personal and social transformation.
Based currently in New York, Jann Cheifitz was born in Cape Town in 1964. Cheifitz has spent the past few years creating a new body of work combining screen-printing, ceramics, painting and embroidery. Started during and inspired by the Covid lockdown, as the global social fabric seemed to unravel, she began stitching together loose threads of personal iconography into fantastical security blankets to ward against despair and to offer hope, inspiration, color, comfort, solidarity and security.
Curator Clare van Zyl was born in 1964 in the Boland, South Africa, and is currently based in Cape Town. Van Zyl holds a BA from the University of Cape Town, majoring in History of Art. Graduating in the late 1980s influenced her approach to artists’ commentary and perspectives.
After working through the 1990s in news and documentary filmmaking, Van Zyl started a commercial film company in 2000, producing work throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In 2004, she co-produced the feature film ‘Boy Called Twist’, which represented South Africa in Cannes the following year.
In the last ten years, Van Zyl has collaborated with local artists to produce art film installation works. These include Brett Murray’s ‘Triumph’ (South African Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017, now in the permanent collection of the Apartheid Museum) and Mohau Modisakeng’s ‘Passage’ (Venice Biennale 2019). A long-standing creative dialogue with Sue Williamson has resulted in three film series, exhibited in the USA, Europe and Australia, as well as in South Africa at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
