Gennie de Lange is unmistakably a painter but unusually and remarkably her medium is not watercolour, oil or acrylic but earthenware glazes.

She has built a pictorial language deeply informed by painting and drawing techniques and established a stylistic narrative coherence across framed ceramic tile work that is part-tribal, part-cognitive, part-journey.

There is an endless search going on, time is being collapsed. Memory functions spirit-like, the humanism of the artist is readily apparent. The ever-present dog is both a metaphor of kindness and understanding, and a dog looking at life. Animal characteristics and human attributes become animal attributes and human characteristics. Moments and glimpses come captured forever, reflections and shadows address time’s passage, houses act as containers of hope, and ladders appear to suggest a path out or way up.

But this is no mixed up world, it’s just that the usual demarcations have been blurred and thus imagination rules supreme and has a sense of place to it.

Gennie de Lange’s mastery of her medium is everywhere seen in this exhibition “Bird in search of a Cage”. Her technical accomplishments are unique and painterly. Equally significant is her artistic confidence and that she can do whatever she wants – for example, we come to see the precision and assurance of finely drawn lines animating many of these works. Humour abounds, life comes as a rhyme.