The Art of Heat
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;
Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,
Vacant the scholar's brain
Under his great hat,
Drug as she may the Sibyl utters
A gush of table-chat
Auden, "Under Sirius"
Sibyll Kalff's work, both as a visual and musical artist, can be boiled
down to a single essential word: heat.
A certain kind of heat permeates her art, a nourishing, quicksilver heat, a heat like that of a drop of nectar oozing from an overripe cactus pear at midday on a Hopi reservation; a heat like that of a bead of sweat gathering at the brow of a Bedouin fruit vendor at daybreak at a stall in Marrakesh; a heat like that of a single egg frying on the griddle of a breakfast café in mid-July in Madrid; a heat like that of a pool of saltwater collected in the navel of a young girl floating on her back in the sea off St. Tropez at high noon.
If there were no heat, there'd be no Sibyll Kalff.
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