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When shipping art internationally, two primary options are commonly considered: crated and rolled. Crating involves securely packaging the artwork in a custom-built crate, providing maximum protection against physical damage but often resulting in higher shipping costs due to size and weight. On the other hand, rolling art involves taking stretched paintings off the frame, carefully wrapping the artwork and placing it in a protective tube. This method is more cost-effective and suitable for flexible pieces. Choosing between crating and rolling depends on the specific artwork's size, fragility, and budget, as well as the destination's shipping requirements and regulations.
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This work is inspired by Asase Yaa, the powerful Mother Earth figure of the Akan peoples of Ghana and neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire., associated with fertility, nourishment, agriculture, truth and the continuous cycle of life and death. The composition reflects her role as the embodiment of the earth itself — ancient, sustaining and ever-present.
The figure is placed centrally and viewed from below, giving her a monumental, almost sculptural presence. Her upward gaze suggests spiritual connection, dignity and permanence, while the symmetrical composition reinforces a sense of balance and stability. She appears grounded yet elevated, embodying both the physical earth and its sacred dimension.
Texture plays a central role in the work. The background is heavily layered, cracked, eroded, and weathered, evoking dry soil, rock, bark, and ancient walls. These surfaces suggest the accumulated passage of time and the continual cycle of growth, decay and renewal. The figure seems to emerge from these textures, visually merging body and landscape and reinforcing the idea that Asase Yaa does not simply inhabit the earth — she is the earth.
The palette is dominated by rich browns, burnt oranges, ochres and charcoal tones, connecting the work to soil, clay and cultivated land. Areas of blue-grey introduce a cooler counterpoint, suggesting rain, air and the natural elements needed to sustain growth. The brightly coloured beads and patterned fabric provide moments of vitality and abundance, while also acknowledging Akan visual culture and identity.
The execution combines detailed portraiture with expressive abstraction. Cracks, drips, layered pigment and fragmented surfaces disrupt the realism of the figure, suggesting the processes of erosion and regeneration found in nature.
In Asase Yaa, the female form becomes inseparable from the land. The work reflects nourishment, fertility, resilience and continuity, presenting the earth as both sacred mother and enduring witness to life, death and renewal.
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Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons was born in 1966 in Cape Town, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. Alongside his visual art practice, he runs a graphic design studio and works as a historian and author. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Pretoria, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a National Higher Diploma in Graphic Design from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He has had two solo exhibitions, titled Nutria, related to his PhD research at the Castle of the Cape of Good Hope (2017), and at the University of Pretoria (2018), and is an awardwinning author of poetry and short fiction.
Symons’s artistic practice engages the tradition of portraiture as a layered and contested archive rather than a fixed representation of identity. His works challenge the notion of the portrait as a complete and permanent record, instead presenting the face as something constructed through processes of accumulation, erasure, and revision.
Working entirely in a digital medium, Symons creates images that echo the visual language of classical painting and illustration. His compositions often draw on the structure and balance of Old Master portraiture, while his painterly surfaces are built through a highly tactile digital process using a pressure-sensitive tablet. Drips, textures, and gestures are rendered with precision, resulting in works that carry the depth and immediacy of physical paint. It is not uncommon for a single image to consist of over 100 layers, each contributing to a complex interplay of colour, texture, and visual depth.
The richly textured surfaces of his works function as visual palimpsests, built up and reworked to reveal traces of earlier stages. This process reflects his interest in the way history is continually rewritten, with the past remaining present through fragments and residues. By referencing classical portrait conventions while simultaneously disrupting them, Symons questions ideas of visibility, memory, and who is remembered.
Through fragmentation and material tension, his work reflects the complexity of identity and historical truth, inviting the viewer to consider the portrait not as a fixed image, but as an evolving record shaped over time.
Stephen Symons is in South Africa exclusively represented by The Artists Gallery in Cape Town and will show 2026 for the first time internationally with The Travelling Art Gallery.
