Sales’s transcendence of loss sets Paris astir

Steve Kretzmann

Many artists scorn the use of the word ‘cathartic’. It is so clichéd. But Lyndi Sales does not hesitate to utter the word for me as I stutter through one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments. “Cathartic? Yes it was,” she says, with a disarming smile.
The question had to be asked, considering her impressive body of work examines the crash of the Helderberg, the ill-fated South African Airways plane that crashed into the Indian Ocean on November 28, 1987, killing all 159 people on board.
Lyndi was 14-years-old at the time, and her father was on that plane, returning via Mauritius from a business trip to Taiwan.
It is the type of tragedy that can take a lifetime to get over, and rather than flinching from it, Lyndi has delved deep into that fateful accident and the secrets and conspiracies that surround it, with the result that she has produced art which is innovative, imaginative, contemplative, confrontational, surreal and even, controversial. But her approach has not, on the surface, been introspective. While loss may have been an original driving force, it is not something she mentions overtly. It is an unseen undercurrent, dimly sensed. The work is not literal. Its sublime technicality gives it great power and reach, allowing it to achieve many translations. She has unravelled many a thread emerging from a complex knot.
There are works produced by this talented printmaker that, if observed with a virgin eye unencumbered with any background knowledge, could be construed as a comment on the current global climate crisis. One medium sized work (approximately 150cm x 100cm) for instance, is a print of the outlines of the world’s continents with gradations of colour reminiscent of a vegetative map. Upon it the intricate patterns of the lungs bronchial tubes have been incised using a laser, and raised to create a three-dimensional image. Other works, using a similar technique of incision into ‘found’ objects, or “ephemera”, as Lyndi calls it, such as the safety cards or emergency flotation devices found in aircraft, might indicate our collective obsession with personal safety highlighted by the juxtaposition with the delicate patterns of the inner human body…or the vulnerability of the body in transit.
The multitude of ‘ephemera’ that Lyndi works with, such as the aforementioned, as well as boarding passes; lottery tickets (the gamble we take when we put our lives in the hands of others); lifejackets; life raft material; ocean bed maps, are indicative of a forensic mind.

Indeed, Lyndi’s study of the Helderberg crash and the opaque narrative surrounding it is a mix between that of a forensic pathologist and an investigative journalist. This has served to strengthen, rather than detract from, her artwork.
The sound applications of technique, methodology, research and the final expression of that which has been soundly internalised, all contribute to the quality of her work.
And proof of this quality is the astounding reception her current solo exhibition in Paris has already received, just five days into the five-week show at the time of writing.

Despite having just returned the previous afternoon, after setting up her 37 works and opening her show In Transit at the Gallerie Maria Lund in Paris’s fashionable old gay quarter, Lyndi, looking fresh and unperturbed, quite casually notes that about 80 percent of her work there has already sold. This has been achieved in spite of their unabashed price tags and in the midst of an economic recession the like of which Europe has not seen (according to pundits at the World Economic Forum in Davos) since the end of World War 2.
Yet anyone who has had the good fortune of seeing one or both of her TRANSIent (2008) and 1 in 11 000 000 Chances (2006/2007) exhibitions which have shown at the Bell-Roberts gallery in Cape Town and Gallery Momo in Johannesburg, might not be surprised at the success this Michaelis 2000 Masters graduate has achieved.
She has no time to rest on her laurels though, her next solo exhibition in San Francisco is coming up, and she says she has only five weeks to recreate a new version of what is her largest and most arresting work: a 3m x 3m installation consisting of 159 hand made, hand cut paper kites supported by bamboo sticks and string.

She also exudes a sense that she is looking forward to having these international showings behind her. Not because she may be able to relax thereafter but because, after years of producing an outstanding body of work from investigating the Helderberg tragedy, she is ready to move on. Already there are a few works ready for San Francisco that are moving away, conceptually if not technically, from this theme. ‘Carbon Cloud’ is one. Made of cutout carbon paper, its conception derives from the pattern formed by a global map of computer servers. But Lyndi is reticent when it comes to talking about a line of enquiry that she herself has not quite formulated yet.
Suffice to say, like the symbolic Chinese act of letting a kite go to fly free following the death of a loved one, Lyndi seems about ready to let go of the cord that has bound her to the Helderberg thus far. She’ll fly far, I’m sure.