Bodies become landscapes in the ethereal, delicate paintings and sublime sculptures of artist Teniqua Crawford, who seeks to reconnect the human with the natural world, through the grounding power of the female form. Using a muted, earthy palette and materials like bronze and charcoal – partly inspired by the rivers and caves of the South African coastline where the artist was raised – Crawford’s blocky, rough-hewn lines, whether painted, sketched or sculpted, make impactful statements with minimal details. Painting and sculpting from life, and drawing from memory and imagination, she intertwines the external and internal realms.

Bare and barely there, the recurrent subject of Crawford’s works is the female nude. Crawford responds to this classical subject with ambivalence – evoked by the blurring of figures, half-present, half-absent, a subtle dance with negative space. The raw energy of her bronze sculptures, meanwhile, play with ideas of masculine monumentality and feminine force.

Crawford’s champion for The Wick is the independent curator Carolina Pasti, who selected Crawford’s painting, Fragment Horizon, for her current exhibition in Venice, Breasts (on view until November at ACP Palazzo Franchetti as part of the official Biennale collateral programme). Pasti told The Wick that she was drawn to Crawford’s explorations of “themes of identity and selfhood, permanence, and impermanence.” Fragment Horizon explores embodiment, inviting viewers to contemplate their relationship with their own physicality. Crawford also makes connections between the human body and the natural world, crafting undulating silhouettes reminiscent of mountain ranges and winding rivers. Her work is very powerful and plays a central role in the exhibition Breasts!”