Time Longer Than a Rope

TIME LONGER THAN ROPE. 2019


Dimensions: 208 X 82 X 36cm


Painted wood.

They only heard the report:
‘The man who formerly persecuted us
is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’
Galatians 1:23

Ever since reading Edward Roux’s book, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, during the 1970s, I have harboured the desire to one day depict the proverb, 'time is longer than rope' in a sculpture. It was only some years after the freedom struggle gave birth to a new democratic South Africa, in 1994, that I was able to explore this notion in my portal theme.

My depiction of ‘time being longer than rope’ has a gloved hand holding a lively snake above the portal’s lintel. The snake is clearly out of its comfort zone. Perhaps the snake (with all its intended symbolism), is meant to convey a forlorn desire by some nefarious force to extend the static piece of rope that has vainly attempted to thread three spheres together in an expression of spiritual unity. The three spheres wont budge as they are firmly attached to one of the portal’s jambs and have lost all their inherent meaning. On the threshold there is a hat that one can either step over or trample underfoot.

On the opposite jamb to the three spheres, a trumpet/bugle form, presses itself into this defined moment in time, calling for an extraneous entity to ‘sound the trumpet’ to bring to order the disarrayed nature of this moment-in-time and usher in something new.

Here is an extract from a South African poet, Mazizi Kunene’s, depiction of moving beyond just such a moment in time towards an understanding of freedom and renewal:

THE FIRST DAY AFTER THE WAR

We heard the songs of a wedding party.
We saw a soft light
Coiling round the young blades of grass
At first we hesitated, then we saw her footprints,
Her face emerged, then her eyes of freedom!
She woke us up with a smile saying,
‘What day is this that comes suddenly?
We said, ‘It is the first day after the war’. . .