While the bounty of summer with lush green vineyards and age-old, shade-providing oaks, is the image predominantly associated with the Cape Winelands, it is when we are confronted with the stripped winter landscape that we are often struck by the unexpected beauty of the naked vines and bare oak tree branches against the stark white of the Cape Dutch architecture. Without summer’s foliage and soft greens, the curvilinear gables, elegant symmetry, whitewashed walls and thatched roofs suddenly offer a new perspective.
The same might be true in nature. While winemakers and viticulturists would tell you about the importance of winter dormancy in the vineyards, they’ll also be the first to agree that what is often seen as winter’s “absence”, is rather a season filled with transformation and renewal. Hurrying out of the rain or cold, we might often miss winter’s qualities and rhythms taking place among the trees.
And this is the inspiration for the latest art exhibition in the La Motte Ateljee.
Opening on 4 July, Among the Trees takes the interval between winter and spring as its point of departure, bringing together a group of South African artists working across painting, ceramics, sculpture, textiles, installation, sound, and material experimentation. The exhibition considers how the surrounding natural world is encountered, interpreted, and translated through artistic practice. Rather than presenting nature as a passive subject for representation, the participating artists engage with it as material, collaborator and source. Their works emerge from processes of observation, collection, memory, and transformation, shaped by encounters with the environments they inhabit.
Among the Trees suggests more than a physical location, but rather a distinctive position within both landscape and cultural imagination. Trees are markers of time, witnesses to environmental change, repositories of memory, and points of orientation within broader ecological systems. To stand among trees is to become aware of temporal scales that exceed human experience. Growth, decay, dormancy, and renewal unfold according to rhythms that continue regardless of human observation. Trees remind us that change is often gradual, cumulative, and difficult to perceive in the moment.
In this sense, Among the Trees is less concerned with landscape as scenery and more with the idea of landscape as a way of thinking. The exhibition proposes that meaningful engagement with the natural world begins through acts of attention. Across diverse materials and approaches, the participating artists invite viewers to slow down, observe more carefully, and consider the relationships that connect people, objects, environments, and seasons.
In Among the Trees, the landscape emerges not as a fixed image but as a layered and evolving experience that can be seen, touched, heard, tasted, remembered, and imagined and guests are invited to an immersive experience that extends beyond visual experience through a series of exciting workshops and interdisciplinary collaborations that explore alternative ways such as taste and sound to encounter the landscape.
