Notes

‘Her compulsion to paint arises, I believe, partly from her own pleasure in her remarkable facility with rendering life into paint. But more fundamentally, I think she has become engaged in a search that allows her no rest unless she paints it. A vital part of that search is the need to grasp the quintessential stuff, flesh, skin, gesture, light and spirit, of which her world is made and to carry what she has grasped onto the canvas. She could use a free hand and any degree of abstraction, but she chooses to render a kind of physicality that vibrates between some place deep within her and the immediacies of her world and those who people it.’

David Goldblatt. (2012) Foreword, in Unfoldings: Heather Gourlay-Conyngham, Pietermaritzburg: Tatham Art Gallery. Page 5.

Gourlay-Conyngham won the inaugural Sanlam National Portrait Award in 2013.

Exhibited

Rust-en-Vrede Gallery, Durbanville, Heather Gourlay-Conyngham: Recent Paintings, 30 June to 23 July 2015.

Moór Gallery, Franschhoek, This Place, This Space, 21 October to 20 November 2016.

KZNSA Gallery, Durban, Five Degrees of Realism, 21 March to 9 April 2017.

Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, Being Human, 27 July to 19 August 2017.

Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg, Five Degrees of Separation: Terri Broll, Ian Calder, Heather Gourlay-Conyngham, Louise Hall and Terence King, 26 March to 20 May 2018.

Literature

Tatham Art Gallery. (2018) Outline, Pietermaritzburg: Tatham Art Gallery. Illustrated in colour on the cover.