The Karoo is a semidesert region that lies in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and is recognized for its stark, arid and harsh beauty. This landscape holds a particular metaphysical place in the country’s imagination. Much public debate on access to water in the Karoo in the late nineteenth century, and in contemporary debates around fracking, have pitted the rational and scientific against the intuitive, the irrational and the emotive. In my art, I explore the registers of language employed between these apparently opposing epistemologies and the resulting fabricated dichotomy that veils other concerns. Below the Sediments (2018) is a five-paneled, two-layered print that visualizes the earth below the Karoo landscape, with images of pipes used for fracking superimposed on this image (Fig. 1). In the paper, I weave into my discussion nineteenth-century water divining in the Karoo and contemporary debates about fracking. I question the...

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Below The Sediments: Dissecting water alienation in the semi-desert region of the Karoo, South Africa: Below the Sediments is a five paneled two layered print images of pipes used for fracking superimposed on this image. In this article, the author weaves references to this work with the history of water divining in the Karoo in the nineteenth century, and contemporary references to fracking. Copyright Christine Dixie.

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