In Search of Lost Time

Notes

"My research on still life painting is rooted in a lifelong love-hate relationship – with the genre itself and with pearls as a recurring motif. I fell in love with Art History in high school, but the subject was taught through a Eurocentric syllabus and accompanied by poor-quality photographs that made the great still life paintings feel distant and unreachable, both in time and place. That distance became part of their appeal: the genre represents an unattainable world of luxury as a single egg, plate or milk jug against a white background rendered with care – the embodiment of a stillness and a pristine frozen moment I still find myself craving amid today’s chaos.

My jewellery series Still Pearls explores this ambivalence towards a symbol with personal and socio-political as well as cultural significance. Researching pearls as a recurring motif across eras of still life painting, confronts one with the duality of beauty paired with a weight of symbolic meaning. Pearls, as worn by my mother and grandmother, evoke conservatism, conformity, colonialism, apartheid and the constrained roles available to women. Yet, I still long for the slower, quieter world they also represent.

The series harnesses the tension between an appreciation for the formal beauty of still lifes and pearls, and the discomfort with what each represented historically. It both questions and honours this fraught yearning for a 'slow intimacy' and 'deep time' that in all probability never truly existed in a world as much imagined as remembered."

Statement by Carine Terreblanche, 2026

Influenced by: December Still Life II by Thornton Walker, 2015; A Porcelain Pitcher by David Oleski, 2008; Egg Study by Alex Venezia, 2018; Still Life of Roses by Frederick McCubbin, 1884

Still life by Thornton Walker, 2005

A Porcelain Pitcher by David Oleski, 2008

Egg Study by Alex Venezia

Still life by Frederick McCubbin, 1884