rETURNING lIGHT INTRO
lAURIANA gLENNY
The pursuit of light is a constant thread running through all the artworks that form part of this latest body of work – almost as though each painting is engaged in a quiet search for something transcendent and radiant. The theme of Returning Light emerged through a creative dialogue between my paintings and the poetry of Elaine Rumboll. Her poems trace a journey through doubt, silence and encounter, leading ultimately to those ordinary places where grace gently returns.
In this way, poetry and painting meet within a shared landscape of light, wilderness and quiet contemplation – a space where revelation unfolds softly. It is, in essence, a return to the illumination of awe and wonder. And in pausing to notice this light, perhaps the viewer, too, may feel a little lighter, and a little less burdened by the weight of the world.
As a contemporary artist working within the long established tradition of landscape painting, my works explore notions of place, belonging and the natural environment. Creating layers of bold brushstrokes with mixed media such as oils, spray paints and acrylics across large canvases, or velvety layers of charcoal across paper, I attempt to capture the everyday moments and unexpected encounters with the beauty that surrounds me.
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Elaine Rumboll
Elaine Rumboll is a South African poet whose work moves between contemplation and the elemental, exploring faith, the wilderness, and the vulnerable terrain of the human body.
Her poetry is marked by stark imagery and spiritual intensity, drawing comparisons with writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, TS Eliot, R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and Mary Oliver.
She is the author of four collections: Blue Territory: Selected Poems (1995), The Child Machine (2001), Markings for an Absent Body (2015), and Unfinished Faith (2026).
Her award-winning poems have appeared internationally in journals and anthologies, and across three decades her work has developed a distinctive voice attentive to silence, landscape and the tensions between doubt and faith.
Alongside her literary work, Professor Rumboll is the founder of the Creative Leadership Consultancy, an internationally awarded creative leadership educator and one of the world’s few Master LEGO® Serious Play® practitioners.
She served as Director of Executive Education at UCT Graduate School of Business, where she scaled the unit to global acclaim and continues as Adjunct Faculty. A Businesswoman of the Year (BWA) and holder of an international Chair in Creative Leadership, Elaine blends academic depth with embodied creative practice to help leaders lead with energy, insight and artistry.
BOOK: UNFINISHED FAITH
In a noisy world grown restless for answers, these poems turn, instead, toward silence, smallness and awe. Elaine Rumboll writes, not from certainty, but from the slow, kneeling trust that meets God in the dust and the dusk. Here, faith is not triumphal. It is the stubborn lighting of a lamp on a windblown night. It is the quiet tending of an ember, the ache of waiting, the courage of noticing, trembling wonder at the ordinary.
Divided into four movements – Becoming Still, Entering the Wilderness, God of the Ordinary and Returning Light – these poems trace a pilgrimage through stillness, grief, work and resurrection.
They offer no easy consolations. Instead, the worn beauty of a faith that listens more than it speaks, and builds with hands scented with stone and olive.
This is not a book to be hurried through, but to accompany the slow, necessary journey home.
In this exhibition, Returning Light, it is powerful to explore how Glenny’s paintings seem to completely inhabit the interior landscapes of the poems in her book, Unfinished Faith.
