Notes

Of this the body of work Andrew Putter states:
Flora Capensis explores the historical possibility of a novel, hybrid culture that might have emerged from a different kind of relationship between the Khoekhoe and the Dutch. Inspired by the place-name 'Hottentots Holland', the series begins with a question: what if the 'Hottentots' and the Hollanders had liked each other? ...

The Flora Capensis series invokes the 17th-century Dutch through their exquisite flower paintings. ... the Khoekhoe ... are invoked obliquely, through the materials from which the still lifes are composed. The flowers, rocks, insects and vessels in these images are all indigenous to the pre-Dutch Cape, the ancestral world of the Khoekhoe.

The status of indigenous Cape flowers today is in some ways emblematic of the history of the Khoekhoe. Although there are more kinds of plants in the Cape Floristic Kingdom than there are in the whole of the northern hemisphere, many of these plants are now extinct, endangered or rarely seen. Centuries of European-dominated taste for exotic plants have led to a radical reduction in the extraordinarily diverse veld that once covered the Cape. For millions of years most of these flowers would have grown within walking distance of the studio where the photographs were taken. But to collect the flowers for these six photographs it was necessary to travel more than 2 000 kilometres, zigzagging across the Western Cape.ⁱ

Andrew Putter is a leading Cape Town artist, former art teacher at Rondebosch Boys High School and former art critic for The Cape Argus and The Weekly Mail. He won a 2007 Spier Contemporary award for his work Secretly I Will Love You More, exhibited at the Spier Estate, Stellenbosch, and Johannesburg Art Gallery and now in the Permanent Collection of Iziko South African National Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include Us at Johannesburg Art Gallery (2009) and at Iziko SANG (2010); Life Less Ordinary: Performance and display in South African art at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2009); and the 10th Havana Biennale (2009). Putter was awarded a fellowship from the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town for 2010.

i. For full statement see http://www.michaelstevenson.com/contemporary/exhibitions/putter/floracapensis.htm