THE QUARRY IS a novel-to-come by Margie Orford. The fourth in the Clare Hart series, it is also a unique  collaboration between Margie Orford and artist Kathryn Smith, who produced a short film and a series of exquisite stills in response to Margie’s developing novel.

Trauma Diorama 1 by Kathryn Smith
The Stalking of Sophie Brown

     Kathryn Smith has created an extraordinary work that is both narrative, linear and an eternal cinematic pulsation  in the present. She performs herself and Sophie Brown (a fictional artist). Through this layered and compelling piece she has evoked a portrait that leaves one satisfied and wanting more.
     Sophie Brown, beautiful, seductive, haunted, is a fictional artist working on an exhibition called An Intimate Geography. Originally the creation of crime writer, Margie Orford, Sophie Brown will star in the fourth (as yet unwritten) novel in her internationally best-selling Clare Hart crime series.
     Sophie Brown has just been brought to life by starring in an exquisite cinematic portrait, which is the focus of one of SABC2s Right Through the Arts, made by Hedwig Barry in five madly whirling and frozen days in Cape Town.
     An artist, a writer, a film, a compelling character who has stepped off the page – like some kind of beautiful Frankenstein. How did this happen.
     If Margie Orford can be described as a crime writer, then Kathryn Smith could be described as a crime artist. A Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year, her serial exhibitions return to the uncanny remains of crime scenes, the mysteries of identity, the desire for relations with the self, the staging and obsession with death and beauty in contemporary culture. Both are obsessed with forensics, with the traces left on us by contact, especially violent contact, with the psychic spaces we inhabit, with how someone can just disappear – as Sophie Brown’s mother does.
     A crime scene, says one forensic psychologist, must be interpreted as one would interpret a work of art. Kathryn Smith’s portrait of Sophie Brown is a riveting combination of imaginary crime scene – the quarry is the place where Sophie’s mother was killed. This was witnessed (fictionally) by a four year old Sophie, but she has forgotten how to remember that trauma. Now preparing for an exhibition – in creating her own artwork. And discovering the crime scene that has shaped her and her life.
     Kathryn’s portrait of Sophie is very beautiful – but that beauty is the hook that pulls the viewer into the mystery of Sophie and her story. Margie Orford wanted Kathryn to create these works of art so that she could, in her writing, respond to the mystery of someone else’s creativity. It is a unique collaboration.
     Through this portrait-making Sophie Brown came to life in ways that neither of them could have predicted. Both of them feel that Sophie – stalked and hunted by Kathryn – has turned and is now stalking them. Perhaps creating them in her image.
     Visually it evokes the density and complexity of film noir. and find me anyone who can resist a femme fatale. Here you have three. Or are the one?

Kathryn writes:
     Through curator Emma Bedford, novelist Margie Orford approached me early in 2008 about a novel she was planning which would feature a young artist called Sophie Brown. Orford had seen my exhibition Euphemism at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 2005, and on the basis of the work on that show, believed I could bring her fictional artist Sophie to life.
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