Earth is “a” Story We Inherit
Solo exhibition by Chrisél Attewell
Curator: Ulziibat Enkhtur
Co-curators: Ariuntuya Jambaldorj & Munkh-Erdene Munkhzorig
Chrisél Attewell, a passionate South African visual artist, works across painting, performance, and photography to explore the elemental language of the land. Known for her deep connection to extreme landscapes, Attewell reimagines folk legends and silent terrains into layered visual stories that speak of memory, spirit, and place.
Her photography captures moments that feel both ancient and immediate, images shaped by time, touched and untouched, humble and luminous. Each piece offers a portal into stories passed between water, sky, salt, stone, and breath. The work evokes the raw, refined presence of the land as a living entity, playful, sacred, and quietly wise.
In this exhibition, Attewell invites us to witness the landscape not only as a background but also as a storyteller, a voice from another dimension that reveals its truth through texture, silence, and elemental rhythm. Here, the earth is not still; it speaks.
The Earth is “a” Story We Inherit – Photography Series:
"Eight photographs tracing shared rituals across South Africa, Mongolia, and Türkiye where nature and humanity meet."
This series brings together eight photographs created during artist residencies in South Africa, Mongolia, and Türkiye. Each image is rooted in its own landscape, yet they speak to one another across vast distances, echoing shared gestures of ritual, storytelling, and creation.
Through these visual connections, the work reflects on what binds us together, not politics or borders, but our deep, living relationships with the earth and with each other.
Across all three places, I encountered stones arranged with care.
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In Mongolia, stones are gathered into Ovoos, sacred cairns that honor the spirits of the land.
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In Türkiye, following devastating earthquakes, people were invited to hang wishing stones from a circular structure on their journey up Mount Nemrut, creating a communal space of hope and remembrance.
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In South Africa, during a performance at the Bodhi Khaya residency, a circle of artists joined me in a pond of water after a flood, reflecting together on the layered histories of the land and our shared presence within it.
These gestures of carrying, arranging, and returning transform stones into vessels of meaning, linking bodies, landscapes, and rituals across cultures.
The photographs trace fleeting moments of joy, play, wonder, community, and reverence. They hold both the rhythms of ritual and the stillness of prayer, offering a planetary perspective rooted in intimacy.
Through these images, humanity’s presence on earth emerges not through destruction, but through acts of creation and care. The series invites viewers to imagine a world of togetherness—a recognition that we are not separate from nature, but profoundly a part of it.
Painting Installation - Quiet Collaboration
"From fragments, a circle emerges."
Suspended within an empty window frame between two exhibition rooms, this painting functions as both barrier and invitation. Hung at an angle, it partially blocks the view while still offering glimpses beyond: from one room, a fragment of video comes into sight; from the other, the series of photographs can be seen in the distance.
Composed of smaller works created in various landscapes and stitched together by hand, the painting conveys a sense of place within its very structure. Each section holds its own textures and colours, built from layers of oil and clay on canvas. In some areas, the paint and clay accumulate into dense, heavy surfaces; in others, the material is worked back so far that the structural gauze of the canvas becomes visible.
A spotlight illuminates the work, and when touched, it casts shifting shadows into the next room, transforming the space and inviting viewers to engage physically.
The painting’s form reveals a circular composition of eight smaller, organic circles. This motif echoes throughout the exhibition: in children gathered to play, in bodies held by water, and in stones carefully arranged on the land. It draws particular inspiration from a circle of fire-blackened stones I encountered while walking through the hills of Tuv Aimag, Mongolia. Though no people remained, their presence lingered in the site, stories once told, a meal once shared. What was left behind was a trace of togetherness, a relic of a moment I never witnessed but could still feel.
By weaving my interpretation of that site into landscapes encountered elsewhere, this painting becomes another layer of that trace, one extended to the viewer. In touching the work, its meaning shifts yet again, dissolving into a play of light, shadow, and collective memory.
Video work:
Milk to the Mountain
"Circles of presence, mirrored in motion."
Arriving in Mongolia, a land on the other side of the world from South Africa, I experienced many new sounds, colours, and textures. The freedom of the culture seems to be drawn from the openness of the land and sky, its rhythm a languid, peaceful flow.
As an introduction to this new landscape, I wanted to create a work that allowed me to learn about people’s connection to this land. I invited Ulzii, a dancer deeply connected to the landscape, people, and culture of Mongolia, to join me in an experimental collaboration.
Set on a hill in the Mongolian countryside, the experiment was simple in its design. I set up a camera on a tripod and, from outside the frame, we began. Ulzii entered from one side of the hill, and I from the other. When we met in the middle, I asked her to start moving, and I would mirror her, attempting to learn from her connection to this environment by following her movements. As she danced, I tried to replicate and predict her gestures, at times in sync, other times misinterpreting, as I attempted to match her fluidity and intention. There were moments when I couldn’t see her at all, and in those spaces, I had to rely on my own responses to the land, diverging from her movements and following my intuition.
In mirroring Ulzii, I wasn’t just copying her movements; I was attempting to translate her experience into my own body, which carries its own history, context, and understanding. The interplay between our movements, sometimes harmonious, sometimes misaligned, speaks to the larger idea that each of us brings our own unique lens to every encounter. Our interpretations of one another are shaped by the places we’ve come from, the cultures we’ve inherited, and the histories we carry.
For me, the experiment reflects the way we communicate, not just with words, but through our bodies, gestures, and the connections we make with the world and those around us. It is an exploration of how we, as individuals and as cultures, relate to each other, to the shared spaces we occupy, and to the natural world - where our sense of belonging truly lies.
Lets Play
This work consists of two mirrored and inverted prints of the same aerial photograph, captured by a drone. From above, a circle of children holding hands comes into view, a moment of connection framed by the surrounding landscape.
The image was taken during my time at the Artist Point residency in Meghalaya, India, where a group of international artists led weekly workshops in several primary schools throughout the region. In one of these sessions, I asked the residency’s documentation team to fly their drone as the children gathered together to form a large circle.
That day, the children collected fallen branches from the nearby forest and carried them into the sandy schoolyard. With these branches, they began to draw directly into the earth, vast, playful forms emerging beneath their feet. If you look closely, you can see traces of their imagination etched into the sand: a pair of wide, staring eyes, the outline of a hand.
What struck me most was the freedom of this moment: the children creating with unrestrained joy, free from the weight of rules or assessment. Their gestures revealed an instinctive bond between body, landscape, and imagination. In using what they found in their environment to create, they transformed the ground itself into a living canvas.
The circle they formed became more than a game. It became a temporary site of collectivity and play, a fleeting expression of shared creativity—an echo of the deep ties that bind people, stories, and the land.
"The ground remembers."
"Earth is 'A' story we inherit"
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A Note on the Title.
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The quotation marks in the exhibition title are not simply a design choice; they are intentional, complicating its meaning.
They draw attention to the small word “a” and the role it plays in framing how we think about the Earth.
Even a seemingly insignificant word carries weight: it shapes perspective, indicates choice, and references the act of interpretation central to storytelling. Here, inheritance does not refer to property or money, but rather how our understanding of the Earth is shaped through inherited perspectives and experiences.
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The Earth holds countless overlapping histories, ecologies, and cultural memories, all inherited in fragments, all carrying the biases of those who came before. None of these stories is neutral.
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By emphasising this tension through the title, I hope to encourage viewers to consider how stories are constructed, whose voices are included or excluded, and how inheritance is mediated by language and perspective.
In this sense, the work is not only about the Earth as an object or place, but about the many narratives through which it becomes imaginable, legible, and shared.
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In these tangled stories, the Earth itself is not a silent listener. It speaks.
The title invites a pause, a moment to reflect on the responsibilities of our inherited understandings and the possibilities opened when we acknowledge that the Earth is never just “a” story, but many.
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