Woven in 1962, Figure in a Landscape is Cecil Skotnes’s first experiment in tapestry, translating the chiselled, colour-block language of his carved panels into mohair and bringing his vision quite literally into the fabric of everyday life. Produced in collaboration with master weaver Marguerite Stephens (her initials “MS” stitched into the cloth), and gifted to close family friends rather than sent into the market, the work sits at a key turning point: Skotnes was teaching at Polly Street, shaping the early careers of Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, and many of the artists in this exhibition, and soon after would help form the Amadlozi Group. As a white liberal educator operating inside a racist system, he remains a complex figure, but the debt owed to his fierce advocacy for Black artists, access to materials, and exposure to African sculptural traditions is immense. In the context of this exhibition, this tapestry appears as “modern-adjacent”: a landscape inhabited by a totemic figure whose linear energy and earthy palette echo the spiritual concerns of his Black contemporaries. Hanging unframed, closer to cloth than to painting, it hints at a different kind of modernism – one in which sacred, ancestral presences might just as readily be encountered in the texture of a household textile as on the walls of a gallery.