Michaelis School of Fine Art - Graduate Catalogue 2019 by Matthew Bradley

MICHAELIS SCHOOL OF FINE ART GRADUATE CATALOGUE 2019

PUBLISHED BY THE MICHAELIS SCHOOL OF FINE ART, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN ALL WORKS COPYRIGHT OF THE ARTISTS AND CONTRIBUTORS MICHAELIS SCHOOL OF FINE ART UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN 31 - 37 ORANGE STREET GARDENS, 8001 DESIGNED BY MATTHEW BRADLEY PHOTOGRAPHY AND STUDENT PORTRAITS BY MATT SLATER, CASANDRA JACOBS AND THE ARTISTS PORTRAIT OF KHANYISILE MBONGWA BY BRUCE TUCK COPY EDIT BY LENA SULIK FINE ART PRINTING BY SCAN SHOP ISBN: 978-0-620-86200-4 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING, OR OTHER ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL METHODS, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. WWW.MICHAELIS.UCT.AC.ZA

CONTENTS

ESSAYS 8 BAFA WORK 14 PG DIPLOMA WORK 192 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 210

Noesis: A Personal Reflection for the Class of 2019

DR KURT CAMPBELL

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

A man is free not if Fortune is given little power over him, but if she has no control. Seneca The personal and vocational paths of our Fine Art graduates are divergent, unique, and often well beyond conventional routes. There is however a shared process that all our graduates have perfected: a method of navigating obstacles to produce results of ingenuity and commitment that have little to do with the vagaries of Lady Fortune. Indeed, they all display, as per the epigraph, a freedom that comes from a self-directed practice achieved by extraordinary efforts of focus, intellect and resilience, capable of producing superb artworks – as this very catalogue confirms. I am certain of my claim here, not only as the result of witnessing many graduate classes ‘come to voice’ through their various exhibitions which I have frequented as an academic at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, but because (as the image below discloses) I am the product of the very same system of education that is the BAFA degree at the University of Cape Town – nineteen years ago. The teachers in the Fine Arts programme have changed many times in the years that followed my first registration in 1996, and the programme has vastly improved against the backdrop of political change and the call for global intellectual

Kurt Campbell, University of Cape Town, October 2000

engagement that has been so vital to the University of Cape Town. The individual effort that the programme demands, however, remains the same. During my personal journey in the years after my graduation, the ‘internal system of intellectual fortitude’ that I developed through the process of producing and mounting my senior exhibition helped me battle financial difficulties, racial slurs and, on occasion, aggressive critics. It ensured that I did not abandon my vision of working as an artist and contributing to the intellectual world as a scholar, even as family and friends warned of the treacherous path that awaited me, as well as the more financially expedient trades that I would be passing up – a decision they regarded as a form of pecuniary suicide! My personal plea to the class of 2019 is that they should actively deploy and perhaps, in some instances, actively search for the internal system that has ‘come to be’ in the passing of time at Michaelis. Stated differently, graduates should be certain and confident of the intellectual/internal conditions they fostered and produced which allowed them the stamina to travel all this way. This silent and invisible gift developed over time will no doubt allow them to travel very much further and, returning to the epigraph, it will afford them a great advantage: the means to seize the course of their own life.

In conclusion: as staff we have been privileged to witness a creative morphogenesis in all the individuals we first met four years ago as first-year students (read: class of 2019). We are all united in that we never cease to be amazed at the results revealed as a consequence of this transformation. We are convinced that the public viewing this exhibition will wholeheartedly agree with our reaction, even if not privy to the noetic structures that wrought the artworks. Indeed, this species of knowledge is for the artist first.

Noesis: A Personal Reflection for the Class of 2019

AUTHORS

DR KURT CAMPBELL

Kurt Campbell, University of Cape Town, October 2000

Dr Kurt Campbell

pg 9

Associate Professor of Fine Art. Acting Director at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

My personal plea to the class of 2019 is that they should actively deploy and perhaps, in some instances, actively search for the internal system that has ‘come to be’ in the passing of time at Michaelis. Stated differently, graduates should be certain and confident of the intellectual/internal conditions they fostered and produced which allowed them the stamina to travel all this way. This silent and invisible gift developed over time will no doubt allow them to travel very much further and, returning to the epigraph, it will afford them a great advantage: the means to seize the course of their own life. In conclusion: as staff we have been privileged to witness a creative morphogenesis in all the individuals we first met four years ago as first-year students (read: class of 2019). We are all united in that we never cease to be amazed at the results revealed as a consequence of this transformation. We are convinced that the public viewing this exhibition will wholeheartedly agree with our reaction, even if not privy to the noetic structures that wrought the artworks. Indeed, this species of knowledge is for the artist first.

Khanyisile Mbongwa Mntana weThongo. Chief Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale.

pg 11

Making the Mundane Divine

I open with Ms Simone’s quote as a provocation to be considered by the graduating students of 2019 as they venture into their practices beyond the walls of the university, for the divine arrives in the mundane not as mere aesthetics. Making the mundane divine is searching for connections, recovery after trauma, locating the intersections and possibly collaging the fragments – which is the thread running through the artworks in this year’s Grad Show. Inspired by an array of thinkers and artists, the works we witness here navigate complex and nuanced themes which investigate the interconnection of time as past, present and future. As we move through the various exhibitions, we begin to see the intersections of colonialism, post-colonialism and decolonialism within a spectrum of ideas lived and expressed through artworks that look at the overlays between land, migration, labour, displacement and dispossession. We see the thread between love, longing, desire, pleasure, utopia and dystopia. We are challenged by the politics of identity through gender, race, sexuality, queerness and class. We are confronted with capitalism, consumerism, environmental warfare and nature’s extinction. We are drawn into the archive to trace lineage, the ancestral, the spiritual. We are tasked with seeing generational violence, trauma and mental health, and with considering self-restoration and imagination. The creative process is more than simple aesthetics; it is also intuition in art making. It allows for a space of contemplation, a moment to negotiate form, matter and subject, in order to question the undertones of our own objectivities. It allows us to wander into the crevices of self, to search for meaning, truth, healing. We search for lost things. We allow for our vulnerability to shape the work, and so we become exposed as fragments of the things we make; we take a chance on our imagination. For ‘nothing happens in the real world unless it happens in the image of our heads’ (Gloria Anzaldúa). The mundane is the everyday, the choreography of lives moving through the cityscape and rural plane. It is the systemic and institutional waltz of injustices, it is dancing with rubber bullets during a protest, it is struggle songs, it is queer love – lived, it is the glimmer of hope. It is in this everydayness that these young artists find the divine. The manifestations of the works in this exhibition ‘remind us that we’re connected to the past and our lives have limitless potential – we were built to touch the divine’ (Heather Havrilesky). In the interplay of mediums, our senses are expanded, and we share an intimacy with the artefacts, paintings, photographs hung on walls; screens projecting moving images; objects demystified and reconstructed. We have stepped into the divinity of the everyday. We move from

the real to the surreal to the sublime and transcendental, the strange and beautiful, the grotesque, and are groped by the absurd and whimsical being and becoming. And when the artists use the body as canvas, it is because [o]ur body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Because self-portraits are like mirrors saying Look, I’m here, I exist. In mining the archive (personal and collective), we see how artists work with myth-making as memory, and how they gather augmented fragments to create a frame through which to imagine oneself, for a moment of self-reconciliation. It is a landscape of worlds envisioned and reconstructed. We are provided with counter-narratives that are resilient to history’s victimhood, and presented with stories that are about survival, imagination, leaping forward and unburdening. Being alive through radical self-love becomes the ritual and religion. We cannot ignore the residue of student movements that came with the deconstruction of the object, place and meaning, thus problematising the university space from a socio-political, economic and cultural perspective – demanding a decolonisation of the institution. Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall came with a radicalised imagination of what university spaces in an African context ought to be, articulating that through their theory of Fallism. The works we see here bear witness to the remnants left behind for the individual to make sense of, and to how the deeply personal becomes both the archive and the catalyst. The artist’s vulnerability and their gaze are portals through which we witness the woundedness and the possibilities for healing. It is this vulnerability that allows us an intimacy. The artist places their faith on the visual evidence through the creative process as release, expression and as a moment of restoration. But what will it cost us? What gaze will we use to determine its value? And if we deem them good artists in the making, where in the art market will we position them?

11 KHANYISILE MBONGWA

An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. Nina Simone

Nkone Chaka (Rona) pg 16 Rosa Roux Jordan pg 28 Dominique du Toit pg 42 Lisa Kleynhans pg 54 Luke Ducray pg 60 Hutchings pg 74 Chloë Jayne pg 78 Spracklen pg 86 Kiri TwentymanCasandra Jacobs pg 104 Thero Gagne pg 118 Shakil Solanki pg 122 Emma Blencowe pg 136 Ulriche Steele pg 148 Paul Wallington pg 152 Leite pg 166 Aimee Messinger pg 170 Deventer pg 184 Láura Viruly pg 188 Hambsch pg 202 Eugene van

STUDENT DIRECTORY

Gabriele Jacobs pg 20 Lara Ja Abongile Sidzumo pg 32 Kate Be Herring pg 46 Cayley Mckay pg 50 Car Sam Fortuin pg 64 Kamil Hassim Chrissy-Jane O’Riorda n pg 82 Jones pg 90 Julia Bidoli pg 96 Ashleigh Makepe pg108 Kerry Lee Chambers p Eden Theys pg 126 Jessica Un Jantjes pg 140 Chelsea Peter pg Caron Goedeman pg 158 Sara Jardine Kino Hogan pg 176 Mia Lötter pg 180 A Clifford Bestall pg 194 Loraine Boyle der Merwe pg 206

Gabriele Jacobs pg 20 Lara Jacobs pg 24 Abongile Sidzumo pg 32 Kate Beatham pg 38 Herring pg 46 Cayley Mckay pg 50 Carla MeyerSam Fortuin pg 64 Kamil Hassim pg 68 Kyle Chrissy-Jane O’Riorda n pg 82 Sydney Jones pg 90 Julia Bidoli pg 96 Ashleigh Frank pg 100 Makepe pg108 Kerry Lee Chambers pg114 Abbey Eden Theys pg 126 Jessica Untiedt pg 130 Jantjes pg 140 Chelsea Peter pg 144 Philip Caron Goedeman pg 158 Sara Jardine pg 162 Jared Kino Hogan pg 176 Mia Lötter pg 180 Anitha van Clifford Bestall pg 194 Loraine Boyle pg 198 Oliver der Merwe pg 206

Nkone Chakaâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;

(Rona)

pg.16

Rosa Roux Jordan

pg.28

Gabriele Jacobs

Abongile Sidzumo

pg.20

pg.32

SUPERVISED BY JANE ALEXANDER & MARTIN WILSON

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART pg.24

Lara Jacobs

Nkone Chakaâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;

(Rona)

pg.16

Rosa Roux Jordan

pg.28

Gabriele Jacobs

Abongile Sidzumo

pg.20

pg.32

CONTACT DETAILS

Lara Jacobs

Nkone Chaka (Rona) monakeharona@gmail.com 079 904 7900 @monakeharona pg.24 Gabriele Jacobs gabrielelevijacobs@gmail.com 076 111 3879 @guanciale_

Lara Jacobs larajacobs14@gmail.com 082 324 0536 @larajanejacobs

Rosa Roux Jordan rosarouxjordan@gmail.com 083 658 5198 @rouxstitches

Abongile Sidzumo Sidzumo.abo@gmail.com 062 135 6648 @abongile_sidzumo

Mona ke ha Rona

It’s a strange thing, identity. For most of my life, I have assumed it to be the

amalgamation of experiences that make up a whole humxn being. It is only recently that I have begun to entertain the thought that identity is not merely a passive set of characteristics, but a thing that can be actively grown and shaped.

that aims to de-gender and celebrate Rona as a fluid being. A combination of found and manufactured wood and metal pieces, this body of work attempts to find balance between Rona and Nkone.

Performance and perception lie at the heart of this shift. I have recognised the chore of wearing a specific mask for each of the audiences that make up my daily life as the springboard for my art practice. The process of creating a whole from these fragments acts as the first real attempt at reconciling the many faces that war within.

It is this conscious cultivation of a spirit identity that has brought my existential trauma to a head, causing me to confront the permanent sense of dislocation that is the consequence of existing in my own skin.

Mona ke ha Rona. This is our house, this is Rona’s house. By embodying Rona, I am actively choosing to claim and occupy space as a black, non-binary body. Mona ke ha Rona is a largely sculptural project, with works such as Ke monna, ke mosali, ke moloi acting as an exercise in both concealment and adornment

Ke monna, ke mosali, ke moloi, 2019 Mokorotlo, beads, fishing gut 153 x 34 cm

2. The Time Walker’s Uniform 2, 2019 Fabric 165 x 70 cm 3.

Ka tla ka kh’atsima, 2019 Beads, fishing gut, wig cap, basket 95 x 24 cm

4-5. The Time Walker’s Uniform, 2019 Fabric 165 x 70 cm

CAPTIONS

That name was mine for the short amount of time I spent inside her body. I have since been unconsciously mourning that loss. According to her, my father insisted on naming me after some family member or the other whom she wasn’t familiar with and, for reasons she hasn’t yet disclosed, she agreed. Now, my name is Nkone. This name is the beginning of a lost, grieving identity.

NKONE CHAKA (RONA)

Rona. That should have been my name. At my birth, a lonely and unceremonious event in a now-defunct maternity ward in Maseru, my mother turned the name around her tongue, ready to bestow it upon me. She once described it to me as short and unique, a staunch declaration of her love. The Sesotho word for ‘us’ or ‘we’, the name was a harbinger of the future, predicting the quiet, contained pair that we would grow to become.

NKONE CHAKA (RONA)

Sanctuary

21 GABRIELE JACOBS

A safe and sacred space. In the cool of the undergrowth, sheltered from judgemental gaze, the denizens of the forest lounge and play. Seeking soft sanctuary. Where love is not gendered, nor affection predatory.

Through the depictions of stylised animal forms, I examine the fallacy of what

The use of smooth, round forms implying softness (though often executed in hard materials) is an aesthetic choice, but also a critique of modern beauty standards. The bodacious and body-positive hedgehog (Idle Idol) is an ode to the softer body. Bubbling up between floorboards, the puddles are portals. Monuments to small moments of affection, what can be seen is but an indication of what lies below the surface – the invisible well of love which exists beneath the warmth of a held hand or a kiss on the neck.

1. a moment of repose, 2019 Stoneware 6 x 15 x 30 cm 2-3.

Untitled Installation, 2019 Ceramic, fabric, wood Dimensions variable

Idle Idol, 2019 Plaster of Paris 24 x 18 x 18 cm

CAPTIONS

Rising from the floor and protruding from the walls, this installation represents a fantastical forest, its varied inhabitants engaged in amicable and amorous interaction, unconcerned with societal prescriptions. Discarded pieces of furniture transform into branches, creating soft curves out of rigid structure. Using sculptural pieces, I aim to celebrate and honour the act of selfacceptance and queer love.

society views as ‘natural’, and present instances from nature which contradict the assumption of heterosexuality as the norm. These include the polecat – though typically solitary, they are often observed living together in same-sex pairs.

GABRIELE JACOBS

I won’t lie to you – I’m going through a lot. I have to be in a state of defence most of the time, especially because of my identity. Part of it is dealing with anti-queerness and anti-blackness where I live and at school. I’m left perpetually exhausted. I’m working with the energy of affirmation to counteract my surroundings. To survive I need a restorative practice to rebuild some of the energy that I’m losing. At the heart of this essentially decolonial practice is trying to find a safe(r) space, wanting to be understood, heard, seen and loved, cared for. Protection comes from arming myself with love. Love is my life’s project – an embodied practice in which healing and empathy are central creative and lived processes. My harnesses with the love letters nestled in them, as well as my other practices, serve as armour. I’m brown, queer, trans non-binary, though the weight accompanying womxnhood is still my struggle, as it’s how I am perceived. I struggle with depression and many other things. I’m excluded from spaces where I should feel safe. I need this practice to tether me, rituals to ground me, and angels and love to guide me.

I had to reconcile who I am with what I love and value for my liberation to find new breath. Loving myself required changing my definition of what is worthy of love. It included de-centring whiteness, de-centring cis-heterosexuality and gender essentialism. Critically thinking about what I’d been taught to love saved me from a lifetime bound by self-hatred. To centre myself and people like me in love’s definition is a radical and necessary act. To centre my black and queer self, and people in my communities, is the most important decision I have made in my life. I’ve been meditating on a healing kind of love for the past eight years. While I’ve thought about love all my life, the ideologies attached before failed to serve me in a way that does justice to my being. There aren’t enough words here to touch on all the ways decolonising my love affects me; it’s threaded through every aspect of my being. From how I hated my hair because it wasn’t straight enough (read: not white enough), to how I repressed my sexuality, because that

wasn’t straight enough either. From trying to conform to cis-gender womanhood, which also idealises whiteness, to de-centring religion and re-centring spirituality. From how I speak to myself, to the way I carry myself, from how I relate to others to what and who I choose to protect. Changing love’s definition changes everything. The mission is to continue to decolonise my love, and heal myself and others. Love Lara (they/them)

Guide me as my wings lay at my back, 2018-2019 Harness: webbing, thread, PVC, paper, O-rings, triglides Divider: amulets including brick, glass, twigs, nail and mirror wrapped in embroidery thread Dimensions variable

Hold all I’ve been through in understanding, singed in a soft embrace, 2018-2019-onwards Acetate, paper, polypropylene, cotton, thread and embroidery thread. Books: A4, A5 and A6. Dimensions variable

Guard me at my side, 2018-2019 Harness: webbing, thread, pvc fabric, paper, o rings, triglides, buckle and carabine hook with keyring of a cowrie shell, rose quartz, ring and sodalite. Divider: amulets including mirrors, screws, glass, twigs, concrete, stones and wire wrapped in embroidery thread. Dimensions variable

Lead me in light and reflection, ever strung at my hip, 2018-2019 Harness: webbing, thread, pvc fabric, paper, o rings, triglides, buckle and carabine hook with keyring of mirror wrapped in nylon thread. Divider: amulets including mirrors, screws, glass, twigs, concrete, stones and wire wrapped in embroidery thread. Dimensions variable

CAPTIONS

I need my angels to draw strength from. Angels are spiritual beings I look to, yet they are also those whom I love. Feeling exiled from church, I believe instead in love, and take comfort in understanding angels as transcending gender. I hold the word ‘angel’ close to my heart and I use it as a term of endearment for myself in my love

letters. These love letters are written to me from myself. There’s always a dialogue in our heads between our selves, so it’s not far-fetched to have love letters in which I am both the writer and the recipient. It’s a necessary turnaround from dialogue being a site of violence to one of love. The centring of myself in this love narrative is a representation I grew up without. It’s also a subversion of a cis-heteronormative trope in which someone who looks like me, who loves like me, is rarely included.

LARA JACOBS

What do you do when you need all your angels?

LARA JACOBS

How did we get here?

29 ROSA ROUX JORDAN

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve sat here waiting pacing contemplating remembering hating forgetting embracing knitting meditating

Using fabric and colour to draw conceptual and visual links between the objects which form the installation and

performance pieces, my body of work becomes an embodied practice. Selftaught in pattern making and fashion design, my interests lie at the intersection of art, fashion and critical questioning. In bringing to life my alternate imagination and alter ego, Red, Red and I overlay our fabricated world with my lived reality in order to draw attention to and obscure the various constructs and hierarchies that dictate and control daily life. Armed with a pair of giant knitting needles for safety, Red and I explore, wander and embrace the incomplete, the unimaginable, and the unpredictable. By embodying Red, I press against the walls of the box, of the body Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been born into, and subvert how my body is socially constructed. White is the world we know, saturated with white memorials, white capital, dirty money, white walls of contemporary art galleries, white-washed institutions producing the knowledge of the old Western tradition. Gold currency is less about the key to survival than it is about

the rich manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s game. Black is cast out into the shadows. Transparency is about seeing through the structures that limit us. Red is the obscurer. In consciously questioning the fabrics of reality, I propose to reveal the cracks, not conceal them. To rather allow them to grow, to allow them to teach us as we ask ourselves: How did we get here?

Box Distortion, 2019 Fabric, steel 70 x 70 x 70 cm

Burning Red, 2019 Fabric, thread, steel, light

Gold Knit Web, 2019 Plastic knitting thread, steel 100 x 150 cm

Chipped Finger Nails, 2019 Slip stoneware 40 x 10 x 8 cm

Fragile Eruption, 2019 Slip stoneware, bubble wrap, thread 40 x 10 x 8 cm

Photographs by the artist

CAPTIONS

In trying to resolve the fantasies of my childhood, I question how fairy tales, nursery rhymes and forgotten dreams, which promised idealised happy endings, have deceived me. How gendered constructs filled my imagination with rigid portrayals of claustrophobic femininity, princesses and fragility. How racial constructs are irrational and chaotic, yet intrinsic to social hierarchies and their sustained control over the movement of people. How capitalism turns people into commodities, binding survival to consumables and disposables. How time is not mine to claim, but separated into savings and expenditure. How knowledge is no longer cultivated but produced. How pushing boundaries becomes less about expression and more about active resistance, active questioning and taking an active part in the unravelling of the constructed fabric we call reality.

ROSA ROUX JORDAN

Something Torn and New

to escape their daily experiences of displacement and alienation, and also as a way of creating social identity that gives them a sense of belonging. By drawing from personal and collective memory, I create narratives that speak about the idea of living beings who are in the process of renewal and healing, and who go beyond bare survival to make something new, to make a mark.

Waya-waya, 2019 Metal, leather and suitcase 155 x 49 x 100 cm

Dismembered, 2019 Metal, PVC pipes, leather and suitcase 110 x 180 x 136 cm

Untitled, 2019 Leather and polycop pipes 243 x 150 cm

CAPTIONS

The lingua franca Fanakalo directly translates as ‘looks like this’: Fana (looks like) ka (of) lo (this) (Hurst, ‘Fanakalo’, 2018). I’m interested in the informal nature of Fanakalo as a language of contact that allows communication in the work place and mine compounds, often used by labourers as a form of resistance

ABONGILE SIDZUMO

My work is influenced by the performance of everyday life and the making of popular culture. I look at the historical references that informed these popular cultures in the multilingual landscapes of South Africa during the migrant labour system. The process of stitching and assembling together found objects such as leather, Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and Polycop pipes to create abstract forms functions similarly to the hybridity of the various languages of the mine workers. These found objects also relate to socio-political issues such as labour, land and belonging.

ABONGILE SIDZUMO

Kate Beatham

Cayley Mckay

pg.38

pg.50

Dominique du Toit

pg.42

Carla MeyerKleynhans pg.54

SUPERVISED BY JEAN BRUNDRIT & DOMINIQUE EDWARDS

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART pg.46

Lisa Herring

Kate Beatham

Cayley Mckay

pg.38

pg.50

Dominique du Toit

pg.42

Carla MeyerKleynhans pg.54

CONTACT DETAILS

Lisa Herring

Kate Beatham kbeatham@gmail.com 076 834 8495 @katebeatham / @rabbitsweater pg.46 Dominique du Toit dominiquedutoit22@gmail.com 073 226 5311

Lisa Herring lisachristina.art@gmail.com 073 109 1063 @whimzi

Cayley Mckay cayleycmckay@gmail.com 079 522 2857 @cayleymckay

Carla Meyer-Kleynhans cmeyer.rsa@gmail.com 083 786 2566 @ethereal.stateofmind / @salty.rsa

Good Boy

The reasoning behind this theme of collaboration and friendship is not only to show the mutual admiration and relationship between human and dog, but also to show the powerful necessity for human and animal communication and co-operation on our Earth.

pets I have ever owned showed me more adoration than my family members. I find safety and love through animals, and believe they can become vessels for many therapeutic situations. I also question the art world through small ironies found within my body of work, examining the value of art and what can be classified as such. In turn, I have created an exhibition for humans but, more specifically, dogs. Conclusively, this body of work is motivated by my personal relationships and the journeys that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve experienced â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and is made with love.

Good Boy, 2019 Photographic print

Mouse, 2019 Photographic print

Sumo, 2019 Acetone print 29,7 x 21 cm

Homecoming, 2019 Photographic print

CAPTIONS

My work reproduces memories from within the home and other familiar surroundings, while the main imagery is always the Dog. This stems from the longing for a childhood that can be remembered happily. For personal healing and growth, I fill the many holes in my memories with happier, unconditionally loving renderings of the Dog, as all the

KATE BEATHAM

My art practice is a collaboration between myself and my dog, Momo. Our work is bound by the depth of our human and non-human companionship. Through a variety of artistic mediums, such as photography and sculpture, Momo and I explore our love and connection.

KATE BEATHAM

As it is (in heaven)

But how are we to build heaven if we do not know what it looks like? The phrase ‘as it is in heaven’ is one that brings up questions about how one defines heaven, as this is a concept that sits differently with each individual. Over the course of the past year, I have formulated my personal definition of heaven, which can be split into three parts: community, neighbouring well and care. The theories of social activist Shane Claiborne have aided in the creation of this definition and in laying out a possible plan for building it:

Claiborne suggests that to ‘neighbour well’ is to have a grander notion of family, to extend its definition beyond the borders of the biological, and to start acting outside of these boundaries. It seems that building heaven looks a lot like building community. This has been an integral part of my practice. I run workshops with the children who reside in Home of Hope, a children’s home in my area. We meet weekly to create things together, and will continue to do so after this project is completed. We spend time and care together, working with the materials, and learning to work with each other. The work that we have been creating has been directed towards answering questions about what heaven, family, relationships and care look like. The creation process forms not only the physical art pieces of the children’s imagined paradise or their views on community and care, but is the tool with which we are building a community. We are building heaven by building heaven. This body of work is a culmination of the care that has been exchanged between myself and the residents and staff of

Home of Hope. With the guidance of those who know the children especially well, and from my own time spent with them, I have created an object of care for each child. Each object has been tailored to each child’s interests and personality, and has been inspired by the artworks that they created during our workshops. The materiality of the objects has been carefully considered, as soft, plush fabric and stuffing create an object which provides a sense of great comfort when felt, held or stroked. My hope is that, when the care from others does not suffice, the comfort derived from these objects can stand in on its behalf. This project has acted as the catalyst for the building of a wonder-filled relationship between myself and Home of Hope. It is one that will continue to develop well past the life of this project, as we continue to lay bricks for our piece of heaven. 1.

Untitled, 2019 Fabric and cotton stuffing 68 x 35 x 55 cm

Untitled, 2019 Fabric and cotton stuffing 100 x 26 x 65 cm

Collaborative drawing exercise called Exquisite Corpse done by children during a workshop Pastels on paper 21 x 29.7 cm

Workshop at Home of Hope

References Claiborne, S. 2015. The Irresistible Revolution. Michigan: Zondervan Lewis, C.S. 1977. Mere Christianity London: Fount Paperbacks

CAPTIONS

Biological family is too small a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border. We now have family that is much

broader than biology, that runs much deeper than nationalism …We have family in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine. We have family members who are starving and homeless, or dying of AIDS, or in the midst of war. (The Irresistible Revolution, 2015)

DOMINIQUE DU TOIT

This work focuses on the notion of heaven. This idea can often act as the perpetual carrot, dangling before us the promise of a better future. It can be attached to careers, achievements or possessions, pushing us to chase a certain reward. If this reward is ever acquired it is not enough, and we search for the next carrot. My aim is to draw our gaze down to the space we find ourselves in now. C.S. Lewis wrote: ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’ (Mere Christianity, 1977). If we were made for heaven, rather than wait for this unfamiliar terrain to disappear, we can start building home.

DOMINIQUE DU TOIT

No Tomorrow Machine

We all wish we could stop time. My younger self has the solution for us all! The No Tomorrow Machine – a simultaneously glorious and morbid machine that stops the next day from arriving.

They have become bittersweet because of what they mean to me: one part nostalgic childhood, and the other my anxiety-ridden adult self, projecting onto the former as I look back. Through these symbols, I have been creating a language I use to express myself. Drawing them repeatedly, these symbols have become of great importance to how I understand myself. Animation, something that fascinated me as a young child, is also a central part of my practice. The ideas and imagery for mine often come to me at 3 o’clock in the morning, when my mental state starts spiralling. My animations are looped, allowing them to be played seamlessly over and over again. The looping mimics how my mental health and art are a continuous cycle, the one constantly feeding off the other. One of my animations is a look

at my No Tomorrow Machine, invented by my younger self. It highlights my relationship with time, and how my mental wellbeing has always been greatly affected by it. This exhibition showcases the fear of getting older, coupled with anxiety. It is a desperate search for the carefree child we have in all of us, while navigating the constant stresses of having to grow up. By returning to how I understood art as a child and the manner in which I created it, I find ways to heal and rekindle the ‘muchness’ that got left behind as I grew up.

1. No Tomorrow Machine, 2019 Animation Looped (forever) 2.

Headroom, 2019 Chalk on board 84.1 x 237.8 cm

Playroom, 2019 Pastel and powder paint on canvas 100 x 180 cm

No Tomorrow Machine, Installation Pt. 1, 2019

70 x 46.3 cm

Mixed media

References 1

Screenwriter, Alice in Wonderland, 2010

CAPTIONS

My practice revolves around my anxiety and my childhood, disentangling and exploring the two in order to come to a better understanding of myself. At first glance, my art can look playful and carefree. Perhaps only I can understand the anguish I am expressing through it, much like how mental health issues operate in life – easy to mask and hide in public. Anxiety has always been something I and many others struggle with; it plagues my everyday life. I use art as a cathartic tool and coping mechanism, to validate and heal myself. My focus is internal, and I draw in order to navigate my own mental health. Hopefully others can find familiarity and comfort in what I am expressing by attaching their own experiences to it.

My work combines elements of both playfulness and unease in the way I draw or the story I am telling through animation. I express this in my practice using symbols from my childhood which I have attached meaning to, such as the colour test screens shown on VHS tapes and box televisions.

LISA HERRING

You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more... muchier... you’ve lost your muchness. Linda Woolverton1

LISA HERRING

echoes of trauma

i carry you with me, 2019 Mesh, broken glass, mild steel 174 x 85 cm

2-3.

thoughts of healing, 2019 Broken safety glass, piping, mild steel 80 x 170 x 110 cm

flickers of what was, remain, 2019 Light bulb, broken glass, rust 50 x 30 x 15 cm

Photograph by the artist

a ‘non-experience’ and

Cracked glass, mild steel

a half memory, 2019 63 x 20 x 96 cm

Photograph by the artist

CAPTIONS

All of this falls into my practice, a queer practice of searching for a place. A practice of poetry and moments visualised and abstracted. One which is collected, broken and re-assembled. A practice of objects, coming to fruition through fusing, rusting, bending and light projecting. Such actions of creation are all prompted by experimentation, stemming from a need to heal.

It is a practice that starts with the lack of memory, and is the process of piecing together a self in the wake of trauma, both trauma of the mind and trauma of the body. A violation that materialises itself, not in moments re-seen, but senses re-experienced. A memory that is fickle in its realisation, and requires cleansing and healing. A body that reacts in moments of uncontrollable triggers. A self that is broken, with pieces then re-assembled in a beautiful improvisation that attempts to heal. A process and approach which investigates failure as a waypoint to healing. This is the practice of a person who, like many others in this world, has experienced trauma and has begun a process of moving towards a state of healing.

CAYLEY MCKAY

I am but a being, like you, fumbling around in the dark, trying to find meaning in the experiences I have. Some experiences we may share, and others we may never understand. Moments of liminality, where you and I exist within these experiences that are far away yet so intrinsic to one another. The connecting thresholds between you and me. My experiences and yours – of trauma and healing.

CAYLEY MCKAY

Where the Quiet Queers Are

Dancing in Nightclubs, genderbending and thrusting Ass grabbing, ABBA singing – your girlboy token friend – Blowing kisses, always your funny friend It is true: Our public displays of affection, Loudest voices in the room, Flag waving, Drag racing, The limp wrist and clenched fist, And Yes, This is the revolution.

Thus, this work aims to speak about the complexities of queer identity, often outshone by its one-dimensional preface: the vibrant, the loud and the energetic. This is simply not the full story, although an appealing anecdote. The watching of queer bodies is used as a central theme. Queer belonging exists somewhere between being observed and existing at ease with who we are. Who are we? What do we need to work through in order to see ourselves as ordinary?

New ways of seeing the queer body are explored in multiple chapters, each addressed through a different visual language of photography. Absence of the body, abstraction of the body, the public and the private, transitions, thresholds, nature, and a queer family – all bound

together in an imagined universe. This imagined universe takes the form of a fantasy land which borrows from both ordinary life and from magical realism to create safe spaces where the Quiet Queers are found. Mystical, misty, familiar yet strange, a new dreamscape open to our deepest darkest fantasy: regularity, equality.

Untitled, 2019 Inkjet print on archival Hahnemühle Baryta paper 84.1 x 118.9 cm Edition of 10 + 3 AP

Untitled, 2019

Hahnemühle Baryta paper

Inkjet print on archival 84.1 x 118.9 cm

Edition of 10 + 3 AP

Untitled, 2019

Hahnemühle Baryta paper

Inkjet print on archival

Untitled, 2019

Hahnemühle Baryta paper

Inkjet print on archival

CAPTIONS

Where the Quiet Queers Are is a personal body of work which, at its core, is an attempt to reveal an overlooked representation of queerness: that of the Quiet Queers. The work is situated in

a moment where queerness is openly celebrated, almost normalised in some parts of the world, yet is still punishable by death in others.

CARLA MEYER-KLEYNHANS

Yes, we are

CARLA MEYER-KLEYNHANS

Luke Ducray

Kamil Hassim

pg.60

pg.68

Sam Fortuin

pg.64

SUPERVISED BY KURT CAMPBELL

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART

Luke Ducray

Kamil Hassim

pg.60

pg.68

Sam Fortuin

pg.64

CONTACT DETAILS

Luke Ducray studi00luke@gmail.com @studi0luke

Sam Fortuin 061 456 2822 sam.fortuin0505@gmail.com @ca.mafeu

Kamil Hassim kamilhassim@me.com 073 078 7712 @ka.makate

Here, There, Elsewhere

You enter a room. It is packed with strange objects, seemingly at random. Some appear to be merely placed as they are, like that deckchair; others have clearly been constructed, like that font. Plants, both real and fake, grow between taped lines on the floor. Flickering TV screens play an incoherent reel of Google Earth screenshots, historical landscapes and music videos. The lighting is dim, focused and yellow, as if in a museum. Overhead, you hear boarding calls play alongside a Gregorian chant. You are offered a map, but it does not lead anywhere.

You walk past the baptismal font of oasis floral foam, filled with wine. Next to it is a pool of dead leaves. You see campaign posters from the 2019 elections: ‘Our Land and Jobs Now’, ‘Laat Ons Suid Afrika Groei’. Your foot disturbs a line of sea salt. A bird calls. You barely hear it over some Korean boyband. I am particularly interested in using the garden to question the concept of static, homogenous wholes. I try to bring in ideas of migration and hybridity, using both historical and fictional examples. They are generally from the period prior to and including the expansionist colonial project, intended to play off the utopic worldmaking underpinning this. These may be the Houyhnhnm of Gulliver’s Travels, or a cut-out of the first rose planted by Van Riebeeck, placed in a pile of spices. Despite the academic tendency to focus suspicion on ideas of power as displayed in the controlled nature of a garden, I also think gardens indicate a desire for safety

and pleasure in a chaotic world. We do not want what is here, but what is elsewhere. I aim to make the installation immersive, in some respects literally recreating the idea of a garden being a microcosmic, constructed haven. This particular installation’s bricoleur aesthetic mirrors a garden’s curation. I endeavour to make the installation a viewing experience that is accessible and inclusive, a utopic endeavour in itself that echoes its subject matter. As you leave, you realise how small that world was, how packed and superficial. This world now feels more real. Bigger and alive. You wonder where all its pieces come from, where they are going. You step over a parking lot line. You make your way to a travel agent; flights to Thailand are on special. 1.

Houyhnhnm, Rainbow and Great Zimbabwe Ming Porcelain, 2019 Mannequin and printout, pool noodles, clay Dimensions variable Photograph by the aritst

Moonchair, after Francis Godwin, 2019

printouts of migratory species

Found wicker chair, wire, ribbon, 150 x 200 cm

Photograph by the aritst

Deluge, 2019

15 mins

Single channel video with found footage

The World as a Garden, 2019

Photograph by the aritst

Mid-year review of installation work in progress

References

Invisible Cities, 1997

CAPTIONS

My installation originates in noting the visual overlap between various spaces, which might suggest their conceptual correlation. These include the paradises of religious texts, the domesticated garden, the scenic tourist destination and the nation state. I view them through the lens of ‘garden’ and its dichotomous existence as a secluded place of care and belonging that requires exclusion of the outside. For me, these spaces all fall under the umbrella of utopia, which is understood simultaneously as an ideal to strive for, while also being unobtainable.

For myself as a contemporary South African, this utopic garden extends into various realms: an inherited colonial vision; a country presently trying to find a national identity within a defined yet random border; and its future in a world that is increasingly more migratory, globalised and digitised. The installation draws references between these utopic spaces into heightened proximity.

LUKE DUCRAY

And Marco’s answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.' Italo Calvino1

LUKE DUCRAY

Becoming the Spirit

65 CA’MAFEU

We give thanks to uMama, ancestors, the mountains, seas, family and friends. Ca’Mafeu is a name that found its way to me through the vibrations of the berimbau – an ancient African instrument consisting of a bow, a single string, a river stone and a calabash. It awakened a spiritual presence within me, as an embodiment of the memory of my ancestral line, a culmination of stories and knowledge forgotten by this time. Ca’Mafeu travels in the space between spaces, labouring to deliver a message. One of retribution that hopes to redirect the course of time itself.

I consider ‘art’ to be a doing word, a mechanism that doesn’t just create pictures but works in reflecting and

Using my body to construct and recreate symbols, my body becomes the first site of interrogation. My labour is my meditation. It is the time I have set aside to work, using my hands, creating something that couldn’t exist without me – existing. I engage with the idea of labour within its contested political context, dissecting how gender and race are linked to our understanding of labour by interrogating structures of power. Storytelling is a place where the spirit can come alive. It is here where we can truly liberate our imagination from any real world constraints. In my work, I explore mythical realism. A realm where my spiritual form can perform their message with love and without fear.

Taal, 2019 Brick, concrete, Black Label bottle, wire 35 (diameter) x 30 cm

Vannie Perd se Mond, 2019

8 mins

Video of performance at Rhodes Memorial

Helmet of Ca’Mafeu, 2019

Black Label glass, animal skin

Haxrd hat, concrete, 40 cm (diameter)

CAPTIONS

As an artist, I work to reveal the layered dimensions of Ca’Mafeu, to evoke an awakening of the conscious spirit. Through storytelling, I explore collective memory and the ways in which space constructs history. Through languages such as movement, sound, video, sculptures and paintings, I explore the memory of meaning.

reimagining our existence as people. For art to be effective in this, it cannot isolate itself. Art must experience and engage with the context in which it finds itself for there to be any meaningful contribution to the question of why art exists at all.

CAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;MAFEU

In the Centre of Stones

My work includes invented musical instruments, which belong to characters in a world that reflects politically and spiritually back at ours. Fully-functional, these instruments are used to create music which exists outside of Western tradition. An object produced by a living creature is placed inside each instrument to bless it with a soul and acknowledge it as its own personality. Within the first is a seashell, within another the golden silk of an orb spider. My process is multi-dimensional and consists of multiple practices. Foundational is the practice of awareness and compassion meditation, similar to that of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. For mind/body harmony, martial arts is also essential, capoeira being my style of choice. Integral to this particular practice is music and community. Naturally then, these influence the actions of the body and mind in the creation of my instruments, as the philosophies which guide meditation

and martial arts bleed into the shaping of wood to create sound. The practice of learning and inventing instruments is itself a practice linked fundamentally to meditation and martial arts. The whole system forms a circle which feeds into itself and seeks always to address pertinent issues at hand. Essentially, my body of work is a study of how culture influences our thoughts, beliefs and our relationship to the world. How the ideas encoded into us by storytelling and art give us the tools to relate to the universe, and the consequences this has for the planet in societiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; current models. It is a study of what we can learn from the old ways, what information in the universe is made accessible according to certain modes of understanding, and how art is necessary to combat cultural and environmental annihilation.

Garud (detail), 2018 Bronze, padouk, purple Heart Bass instrument

Garud, 2018 Bronze, padouk, purple Heart Bass instrument

Dharma, 2019

silver-nickel, string,

Wood, Kudu bone, Brass, seashells, spider silk 102 x 30 cm

CAPTIONS

In the West, the notions of art are quite different to many other cultures. In my view, the Tibetan monks at the foothills of the Himalayas, the jaguar shaman of the Barasana, or the way-finders of the Polynesian archipelago are the pinnacle of what it means to be an artist. They live and breathe their practice as an integral

ingredient in life, illuminating passages of possibility. In spite of these different practices being separated by time and space, they are products of an essential human commonality possessed by all of us, a topography of human imagination woven into the fabric of existence by different peoples. The traces of these are very much alive today.

KÄ&#x20AC; MAKATĂ&#x2030;

A musical and filmmaking autodidact, I began to develop my skills in instrumentalism, and translated my practice of martial arts, music and visual art into a single system of art making. The purpose of this practice is to present indigenous non-Western knowledge in regards to art, music, spirituality and environmentalism. I aim to represent information which has been lost due to colonisation and white supremacy, and give a voice to myself and to people like me. The ultimate aim is to maximise the existence of my practice to the benefit of all sentient beings. Art for me is then the progress made to this end, and not simply isolated aesthetic objects. Inspired by the intentions of a Bodhisattva, by art from across the world, and modern science from all continents, my work is most interested in art as integral to culture and society. This manifests here as sculptures, musical instruments, films and meditations, which seek to explore ancestral tradition and reinvent them for today.

KĀ MAKATÉ

Kyle Hutchings

Sydney Spracklen

pg.74

pg.86

ChloĂŤ Jayne

pg.78

Kiri TwentymanJones

pg.90

pg.82

SUPERVISED BY STEPHEN INGGS

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART Chrissy-Jane Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Riordan

Kyle Hutchings

Sydney Spracklen

pg.74

pg.86

ChloĂŤ Jayne

pg.78

Kiri TwentymanJones

pg.90

CONTACT DETAILS

Chrissy-Jane O’Riordan

Kyle Hutchings khutchings1@gmail.com 081 384 2514 @hutchingskyle

pg.82

Chloë Jayne chloe.jayne.v@gmail.com 076 272 8082 @venusthepoet

Chrissy-Jane O’Riordan 076 595 2264 chrissyoriordanart.com

Sydney Spracklen sydneyjade@outlook.com 074 170 9207 @sydneyjade_

Kiri Twentyman-Jones lynjones1995@gmail.com 079 738 4227

Absurdity and the Art Market

The prints have been rendered in exact proportion to the original works, and include the corresponding literature

The second body of work – a chess set – pays tribute to Marcel Duchamp and his fascination with the found object, while looking at the art market as a largely unregulated game. The chess pieces are objects that have been selected to represent artists who feature in the South African art market, and their hierarchy within it. The players will really have to get to know the pieces to attempt to play the game. Although initially placed in their appropriate positions, the pieces can be moved around, just like artists and their markets do, as they fluctuate in and out of popularity and relevance. Just hours after the news had filtered through that the Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt, Damien Hirst’s solo sale at auction fetched £111.5 million.

Galleries fiercely protect their artists by buying their own work at auctions, and big collectors have the potential to buy up work from artists when they are still emerging, pushing them into the stratosphere, in order to manipulate their own investments. Charles Saatchi, for example, had already collected nine of the fourteen Turner Prize winners’ works before they won the prize between 1984 and 1998. The art market is a strange place, with lots of idiosyncrasies that make it completely unique. People are buying artworks for a variety of reasons, and not necessarily for the love of art.

Igshaan Adams, 2019 Lithograph 40 x 55 cm Trial proof

2. Jody Paulsen, 2019 Lithograph 55 x 80 cm Trial proof 3.

Simphiwe Ndzube, 2019

55 x 80 cm

Lithograph

Trial proof

CAPTIONS

My graduate exhibition comprises two bodies of work. First is a series of prints exploring the per-centimetre-squared Rand value of specific artworks sold at auctions in South Africa, as a means of questioning the ludicrousness of what people have paid for a small square of an artwork. I have chosen a crosssection of artists who have regularly featured on auction, as well as firsttimers and emerging artists achieving ‘world record’ sale prices.

produced by the relevant auction house at the time of the sale. The price and colour of my prints correlate to the prices of metal in South Africa, with Irma Stern’s Two Arabs, the most expensive work yet sold on auction in South Africa, in gold. This is followed by up-and-coming artist Jody Paulsen’s Donatella ver-jayzee (which was Paulsen’s debut on the secondary market) in lead.

KYLE HUTCHINGS

The primary impetus for this project emanates from my own observations of the art market, and the subsequent questions raised regarding the monetary value attached to artworks – price tags that often fall in the realm of absurdity. This exploration extends to the power dynamics that exist among art world players, as well as the relationships between the art itself, those buying the art, and anybody else that has a role in these transactions: the dealers, gallerists, flippers, influential collectors and the artists themselves.

KYLE HUTCHINGS

It’s Not That Deep; It’s Layered

By making use of imagery such as the grid, frameworks, cracks and found objects through collage, photography and installation, I aim to represent the breakdown of manufactured space. The roles of these often-overlooked parts have been centralised, in order to translate visually a variety of experiences through minimalist production. The textures of said spaces and the disjunctures between them have been used to symbolise the tensions which form within myself as a feminine body when entering into these areas. While the work is contextualised within the framework of my own fears, comfort zones, obsessions and therapeutic tendencies, my belief is that the work will always speak to something broader – regardless of the similarities and differences between the artist and the viewer.

Is it such a tragedy to be surrounded by surfaces (skin, walls, furniture) which are imperfect, cut into, painted, replaced? Those which fail us in their appearance? Those which are neither useful nor fit into our tight plans and constrictions? Or are we just looking at them wrong?

Crack (1), 2019 Offset lithograph on Munken Lynx 35 x 25 cm Edition 1 of 10

Things from the Bin, a Pin, a Plinth (Installation) recycled wood, primer, wire 67 x 180 cm

Crack (3), 2019 Offset lithograph on Munken Lynx 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 10

The Grid, 2019 50 x 40 cm Photograph by the artist

Crack (2), 2019 Offset lithograph on Munken Lynx 35 x 25 cm Edition 1 of 10

CAPTIONS

The ideological landscape of the grid, which is embedded not only into our constructed surroundings, but deeply in our consciousness, has been represented in art and architecture since the postmodernist era. The work I have created aims to present years of un/learning, healing, navigation, cleansing and reform in relation to this ‘organised’ form of spatial awareness. Within architecture, I notice metaphors for human existence

represented through the fragility of certain mediums. In this case, fabric, sand, paper, wire and hollow plinths speak to the brokenness of and need to question social and spatial ideals.

CHLOË JAYNE

My somewhat ‘alternative’ ideas surrounding space have always begged to have a place in ‘the real world’ – which is what has brought me to this conclusion in my degree. Youth was where idealisation and perfectionism began for me, where anxiety started to dig into my neck and where isolation became a coping mechanism. Being somebody who had the privilege of being raised by artists, architects, scientists, Buddhists, Christians and intellectuals, single parents, step-parents, grandparents and teachers, I chose a life which always reflected interconnectivity – and my manner of working has been no different.

CHLOÃ&#x2039; JAYNE

Impermanence Embodied

Time runs on a path that is irreversible. Death and decay are inevitable, even predictable. Along this path, however, I create, accept and embody the ephemeral and the unpredictable. Nature and the overlooked feature in my work, both in the material and in the process of making – blurring the gaps between the natural environment, the art world and, more broadly, human nature.

De-aestheticising the process of making art creates space for the medium to hold the message while encapsulating its own aliveness. Giving nature autonomy thus shifts my role as an artist from facilitator to participant, and finally to witness of an unfolding transmutation. Natural processes and elements thus participate as my tools, my companions and my masters in guiding me with the materials, as well as with my own growth in this journey. Just as there are constant reactions from nature’s elements, there are similar alterations happening in both inner personal and social systems. A conversation begs to be started on how best to blur the boundaries between man and nature, and how to more carefully connect back to the inner world that governs Mother Nature as a whole. This relationship is feared to have been lost in the anthropocentric age of today. Mazing through man’s structures and rigid systems, which see nature as something that merely serves man, I suggest a different outlook: to realise the peace and rejuvenation that can exist when the choice is made to observe and learn from nature rather than deplete and attempt to control it.

Through encouraging or amplifying these dynamics in my own structures and ways of working, my mind, body and hands are an impetus, urging the path of potential predetermined outcomes to be left largely to chance. Rendering decay and change as being fundamental tools for living, I highlight the value of the moments of change – whether these be painful and abrupt, slow or fleeting – framing a cyclic process. In viewing the world holistically, with our iron and salt bodies as landscapes, there is an undeniable strength which surfaces from rolling with the winds and tides of change in all our bodies’ insignificance and vulnerability. Just as a flourishing fynbos bush emerges from the fire and weathered soil, so too can aspects of our social, personal and physical world transform and evolve from the rubble into being a more sustainable whole.

Extracted, 2019 Natural materials on Fabriano 70 x 50 cm

Smoke, 2019 Burnt fynbos smoke on canvas 70 x 50 cm

Sediment (detail), 2019 Salt water & rust on metal 195 x 63 cm

References 1 Fries, K. n.d. Katherine Fries: About. Available: kathfries.com

CAPTIONS

My primary source of dyes, inks and pigments was developed by extracting the residues of plant material, rust and ash from the natural processes of burning, oxidation, degradation and evaporation. These alchemical processes are steered by nature’s elements: earth, fire, water and air. These forces alter the material’s state and form, both when working with the inks themselves and when introducing them onto the surface of the canvas. A constant metamorphosis of matter occurs in the time between the application of the inks and the resulting visuals seen on the surface. The drying process, which undergoes further reactions and evaporation, is thus

a driving force in its own performance. The residues that remain from the motions of these processes continue to breathe, and are vulnerable to alteration over time – a visual representation of further change and impermanence.

CHRISSY-JANE O’RIORDAN

Our existence is entirely interdependent with and relative to the materiality of our surroundings: it is these relationships that enable us to live. Living is an ongoing process, never a contained state; such relationality enables and sustains life as constant activities of co-creation. Katherine Fries1

CHRISSY-JANE Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;RIORDAN

Everything Is Fine

Through my practice, my intention is to create an experience; something intangible, yet accessible through instinctive human senses. I attempt for it to be understood in a personal manner instead of only visually or theoretically. My working process revolves around a feeling, or a multitude of feelings. These arise for some only a few times in their life. For others, it’s something that they feel every day – so much so that it becomes normal. Perhaps they can even take comfort in knowing that it will be the one consistent thing in their life.

With this intention, I play with themes of safety and security as well as the uncanny, which are centred around mental health, obsession, trypophobia, purification and detoxification. My work includes a soft, squishy room that is stark white and blindingly bright. In contrast are representations of things that Western society has deemed creepy and gross (like insect cocoons, webbing and holes), made out of felted and knitted material. By juxtaposing these, I am subverting the strange and desecrating the precious. Similarly, I purposefully use the reduction of colour as a means of abstraction. By composing a space that is white, I reference the colour’s symbolic meaning – white can suggest purity, cleanliness and

light. But, at the same time, white in other contexts could represent the sinister: mould, insect eggs, maggots, rot, sterility and coldness. In the same way, I use fabric to portray this contrast in meaning. I achieve this by using massive amounts of bleach, which is used to disinfectant and to clean, while at the same time stripping and damaging what it touches, purifying but corroding at the same time. I have made an alternate world that the traveller must step into, leaving the world they once knew behind.

1-3. Womb, 2019 Knitted cotton, waste batting, bleach Installation 4-6.

Holes, 2019 Felt, woven waste cotton fibre 350 x 150 cm

CAPTIONS

My creative process is an exploration of an experience so, naturally, my final product becomes an all-encompassing experience as well. I ask the visitor to step into a world of my own making and forget about where they came from. To

see, hear and feel unusually, observing the weight on their feet differently, and letting their skin and lungs adjust to the different levels of moisture in the air. Tacitly I am creating a padded safe room or womb where they can’t be hurt, where the outside world can’t get to them – but they are stuck inside with themselves.

SYDNEY SPRACKLEN

The self-fulfilling prophecy that creates itself and undoes itself. The need to conquer and control obsession, ironically, becomes the focus of the obsession. To bleach and strip; 'purifying', while poisoning.

SYDNEY SPRACKLEN

a suspended space

Imagine a piece of leather on which someone has poured sticky syrup, inducing a vibrant honey colour. Leather, emitting a distinctively potent, sweet but vinegary smell, engulfing an entire room. A material resembling decaying or rotting flesh, repulsive to the touch. When exposed to flames it bubbles and pops like burning flesh before turning to ash, yet simultaneously shines with beautiful, intricate, golden textures at close range. This material – a creature.

The shoreline, situated between the binary environments of sea and land, also repeatedly presents itself within my artistic practice. Considering it a ‘space in between’, I question the dichotomous structures that have been presented to me all my life. Alongside countless representations of the shoreline, this is done using a breathing, suspended space made up of that which the sea rejects and which the land cannot retain. Together with life and death comes a philosophy of embodiment. Contemplating the shoreline’s seemingly fruitless objects, I am simultaneously surprised, disgusted and intrigued by them. Living, decaying, dying and dead things find their way into my studio space, displaced, transformed, re-made and re-contextualised into a personal collection. A collection of curious things that question processes of value, ownership, temporality, self-growth and definition. My interest lies in the aesthetic, textural and sensual realm of these collections. Observing and re-visiting life that still lurks in the in-between, with life

only existing simultaneously to death. A circular view of creation and destruction, desire and discard, and life through to death is materialised. Continuously de-constructing, re-shaping and re-creating, I begin to experiment with my collected objects by preserving, stitching, burning, dyeing and moulding them into new creatures and life forms. I question where the human might position itself among it all. Perhaps as an instigator of the preservation of not only life, but also the death of so many different organisms on this planet.

fold – unfold, 2019 SCOBY, paper, sea water, wood 68 x 40 cm

2. Texture, 2019 Digital inkjet print on cotton paper 49 x 79 cm Unique 3. SCOBY (detail), 2019 SCOBY References 1 Thill, B. 2015. Waste (Object Lessons). Schaberg, C. & Bogost, I. (eds). New York: Bloomsbury Academic *SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast): a gel-like elastic membrane which grows in a body of sugary tea. An organism known as a ‘mother’ or microbial mat, when used to make the health drink kombucha.

CAPTIONS

The SCOBY* is dried out, stretched, folded, moulded, burnt or oxidised black and then sculpted into origamilike shapes and life-like creatures. The transformation of the disgust-evoking material into an intriguing presence places itself at the forefront of my artistic practice. Julia Kristeva philosophises about ‘abjection’, where the ‘absolute realisation’ of life manifests in the desire to distance oneself from that which may be directly threatening to one’s state of existence. I, however, am compelled to

challenge the binary structure of life and death, and our automatic response of being repelled by things that generate unease within ourselves, be it human life or that of another.

KIRI TWENTYMAN-JONES

'A defamiliarising stage in our relationship to the things we desire and the things we discard. It marks the transition from discrete objects to mere material, a return to rawness.' Brian Thill1

KIRI TWENTYMAN-JONES

Julia Bidoli

Casandra Jacobs

pg.96

pg.104

Ashleigh Frank

Thero Makepe

pg.100

pg.108

SUPERVISED BY SVEA JOSEPHY

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART

Julia Bidoli

Casandra Jacobs

pg.96

pg.104

Ashleigh Frank

Thero Makepe

pg.100

pg.108

CONTACT DETAILS

Julia Bidoli jsbidoli@mail.com 079 931 6452 @juliabidoliart

Ashleigh Frank ash360frank@gmail.com 072 267 6102 @ashleigh.frank

Casandra Jacobs casandrajacobs@vodamail.co.za 082 715 1148 casandrajacobs.myportfolio.com @picassie

Thero Makepe theromakepe@gmail.com 078 903 5223 / 026 775 619 776 @otherthero

Throwaway

The process of taking care of these objects is a projection of self-care. Finding, curating and intervening with them allows me to see myself in the creative decisions I am making. This is incredibly important, as I have recently surfaced from an extended period of trauma, including multiple losses and a diagnosis of bipolar II, which has eroded my sense of self.

All the packaging I am using has been industrially designed, which means

I highlight how these objects appear mundane on the surface, when in fact their ubiquity is more sinister. It is the fact that we are so familiar with them that makes them – and their production, lifespan and impact on our lived environment – so invisible. Their materiality implicates me through the impact my consumption has on the planet and, ultimately, our human environment. This packaging is the residue of the food I’ve eaten, the things I’ve bought, the places I’ve been. These objects are existential extensions of myself. They represent the depressionwrought guilt I have for being alive, and all the energy and resources I use up.

However, these objects are also evidence of my will to live in spite of said depression, of refusing to let go of the physical world. It is about confronting aspects of myself and learning to appreciate them. This is not only about myself, but about the traces of all ourselves within manmade things, and the legacy we leave behind through our consumer-driven lives. I am searching for how to situate my identity and find meaning in the wreckage of the post-modern, capitalist society that we have inherited.

1. Water bottle, 2019 Photographic print on watercolour paper 21 x 14.8 cm Unique 2. Eggbox, 2019 Monoprint on paper 59.4 x 42 cm Unique 3. Throwaway no.1, 2019 Collected packaging waste 134 x 25 cm Unique 4. Produce bag and pill sleeve, 2019 Monoprint on paper 59.4 x 42 cm Unique 5.

In motion, 2019 Collected packaging waste, animated

CAPTIONS

I relate deeply to the objects I collect, which is why I view this as an exercise in self-portraiture. I have carefully chosen each one for its special visual, textural or emotional resonance. Some I have even travelled half-way around the world with. Essentially, these objects mean a lot to me, but may not mean a lot to others, so it is my intention to draw attention to their beauty and value.

that a human has devised it to serve its function perfectly. Little details, like the angle of the curve on a vegetable tray, can be the difference between a functional package and broccoli all over the floor. This is particularly important, as a lot of these objects constitute nonrecyclable waste, which we would do well to consider, treating them with more respect in order to preserve human and natural life. Furthermore, even recyclable waste has a finite number of times it can be recycled, meaning the process is ultimately not sustainable.

JULIA BIDOLI

This is a project about the collection and restoration of those things we most often and easily dispose of and, through this, the recovery of the self. By treating these collected packaging materials (essentially rubbish) as precious objects, I elevate them to the status of art, imbuing them with greater social value.

JULIA BIDOLI

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How to Build an Ocean

My practice is based on the idea of building an impossible ocean. I am creating my own oceanic elegy, as

a means of expressing reflection. The sea as a zone where death and obliteration occur permeates the Western cultural imagination. The sea is also a kind of memento mori, perhaps because it shares qualities with death: intangibility, constant fluidity, inevitability and omnipotence.

Half of the footage used is my own, which was shot around Cape Town’s coastline. This is intentional, because it reinforces the feeling of confinement within a specific city, and a longing for the faraway. In my footage, my camera and I are always positioned on the shore looking out to sea.

The sea is also a vessel, where acts of observing, recording and physical immersion feel exhilarating. It is this sense of life (which pulses with every wave and seagull’s shriek) that starkly contrasts the deaths I have encountered, and that has become a point of contention in my thinking. The ocean has become a symbol of duality. The ocean is both a giver and taker of life. My art practice exists in a strange symbiosis between mourning and creating.

The other half of the footage used is freely-available stock footage of the ocean. This material has been sourced over the internet and is taken from multiple cities and continents around the world. These are combined, at times in ways which match, and at other times in ways which are uncomfortable or unexpected. Tranquil scenes are supplanted by a shark swimming in the water, for example. In a sense, this video reflects a tumult of its own. I attribute this feeling to a kind of seasickness, which is comparable to the sense of nausea caused by grieving.

Due to the vastness of the subject, I decided to pursue an interdisciplinary approach. Inspired by Gerhard Marx’s aerial works, I captured images using Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. This produced a series of prints making up a fragmentary ocean, employing satellite imagery of the ocean and including uncaptured areas. My major artwork this year is the multichannelled video How to Build an Ocean. It consists of overlaid footage of different sea waves and ocean scenes.

Island I, 2019 Digital print on Epson watercolour paper 29.7 x 42 cm

Island II, 2019 Digital print on Epson watercolour paper 29.7 x 42 cm

Ocean I, 2019 Digital print on Epson semi-gloss paper 84.1 x 84.1cm

Ocean II, 2019 Digital print on Epson semi-gloss paper 84.1 x 84.1 cm

CAPTIONS

INSTRUCTIONS I dreamed I was leafing through an American magazine with photographs of ponds and pools. I saw everything, detail by detail. The letters A, B and C described precisely every component part of the plans and outlines. I eagerly began reading an article entitled: ‘How to Build an Ocean: Instructions’. Tokarczuk, Flights

ASHLEIGH FRANK

Following the passing of my father in 2013, I have continued to feel a strong sense of longing and loss. This has led me to make artworks that deal with the idea of world-building and impossibility. I additionally feel a sense of restlessness and yearning, since I have moved around multiple times within the single city of Cape Town. The most profound literary influence on my work this year has been the novel Flights, written by Olga Tokarczuk. This novel resonated with me because of its themes of movement and travel, described succinctly and abstractly by the author. The novel is very fragmented, which relates to my feelings around being confined in the city. The title of my body of the work is adapted from a short chapter in the novel:

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Keelvol

Film photography was also very specific to this project, as it became part of my practice of framing the details in the mundane. The use of film was important in capturing the mood of nostalgia, for both its stylistic look and its significance in the history in photography. I used a variety of films, experimenting with various expired colour films. The overlysaturated tones and colour palettes allow for an expressive exploration into a nostalgic reading of the images. Keelvol deals primarily with a kind of pensive longing – while never achieving satisfaction or a resolution to these feelings of desire – much like the introspection that seems to come on a Sunday afternoon. A type of reflective melancholy and contemplative anticipation of the future. In the surreal moments where these two meditations mix, it creates an instant in the present which I believe evokes the keelvol feeling within a person. I chose to amplify this kind of feeling in the way I shot stylistically. I captured

in-between moments, just before or after something had happened. These quiet moments lend themselves to a kind of reverie. I captured scenes within both domestic and public spaces, always leaning however towards a very intimate reading: like the innocence of animals at the market, domesticated plants in public and private spaces, and even different light sources in mundane settings. These elements I believe encapsulate my feelings and the context of Keelvol – the feeling of something in your throat, that you just can’t seem to swallow down.

Windows (detail), 2019 35mm film photograph

Geese at Market, 2019 35mm film photograph

Afternoon Slide, 2019 35mm film photograph

Parked Car, 2019 35mm film photograph

Hands in Bucket, 2019 35mm film photograph

CAPTIONS

Keelvol is a collection of photographic works which are curated into a fine art photobook. This form of presentation is specific to this project, as it allows for a personal and intensive curation of the images into pairings, and thus an intimate reading into the work. This project is thus a type of selfportraiture project.

CASANDRA JACOBS

The direct translation of keelvol into English means ‘to have a full throat’. In different contexts, this meaning can include a variety of emotions: being anxious, fearful, fed-up, melancholic or uncertain. An interesting aspect of this word is not only in its meaning but also in the act of saying it – it physically tightens your throat as you pronounce the word. It is thus that I felt this the word encapsulates my practice this year, in both a physical and contextual sense. Through the lens of looking, and through framing situations within the mundane, and isolating elements within that framing, I emphasise the conceptual meanings that fall under keelvol.

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Music from My Good Eye

However, in my practice this year I have aimed to create a sort of visual album for my grandfather, which not only speaks to my family lineage but addresses themes of migration, loss, separation and conflict through my work. At the heart of the conceptual framework for Music from My Good Eye is my family archive, which includes photographs, vinyl records and documentary videos.

This inspired me to create conceptual tableaux which address my familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trauma from the past, and my appreciation for the present, as well as what the existing remnants of colonialism still mean today. Having migrated from South Africa to Botswana in the late 1950s, my grandparents still helped with the struggle for liberation in South Africa by providing accommodation to exiled members of the PAC and ANC. On the 14th of June 1985, the South African Defence Force launched a raid in Gaborone, Botswana, in which fourteen Batswana were killed in what the Defence Force claimed were ANC houses. In my interpretation of these events, from both the personal memory of my family and the collective memory I have read about, I tried to recreate them through my photographic practice. In the spirit of being inspired by jazz musicians, I studied the improvisational

aspects of the music I have inherited, and I have tried to apply it to my own methods of visual art making. This has been challenging, as I have had to learn that improvisation does not necessarily mean performance or making without thought, but rather masterful performance or making which goes beyond the bounds of convention, returning to the convention it originally aimed to subvert. I began to explore visual improvisation in the form of photomontages, in which I blended, contrasted and compared existing family archive photos with photography that I was shooting for this project. Through the way in which I constructed the previously-mentioned narratives, I have created a body of work which I hope gives the viewer an inkling of the peril and trauma-stricken world I have constructed, and the hope for restoration and peace.

1-6.

Music from My Good Eye (series), 2019 Digital photograph from artist book 27 x 21 cm Edition of 10 + 2AP

CAPTIONS

During my research, what became increasingly apparent to me was the psychological toll that the apartheid regime took on individuals on a micro level, which I had never considered or engaged with before. My great-uncle shared the personal traumas that he had experienced throughout his life, such as having many of his family members and

friends incarcerated by the government, and not being able to have a stable, nonturbulent upbringing. The many years of fighting, struggling and feeling powerless even made it difficult for him to enjoy his passion for music and, at some point, he became so frustrated and depressed that he stopped playing music entirely.

THERO MAKEPE

This body of work is inspired by my grandfather, Hippolytus Mothopeng, who was a jazz musician performing in the 1960s and 1970s in Botswana. Significantly, by the time I was born in 1996, my grandfather had gone blind. He never physically saw me, but we shared a strong bond until he passed away in 2012. One of my grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dying wishes was for one of his offspring to become a musician, which unfortunately never came to fruition.

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Kerry Lee Chambers

Eden Theys

pg.114

pg.126

Abbey Gagne

Jessica Untiedt

pg.118

pg.130

SUPERVISED BY FRITHA LANGERMAN

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART pg.122

Shakil Solanki

Kerry Lee Chambers

Eden Theys

pg.114

pg.126

Abbey Gagne

Jessica Untiedt

pg.118

pg.130

CONTACT DETAILS

Shakil Solanki

Kerry Lee Chambers chamberskerrylee@gmail.com 082 444 1041 @creativemumbling pg.122 Abbey Gagne abbeygagne@gmail.com 065 858 4620 @abbey_gagne

Shakil Solanki shakils97@gmail.com 063 777 4900 @isolank / @shakilsolanki_studio

Eden Theys theyseden@gmail.com 074 245 7561

Jessica Untiedt jess.untiedt@gmail.com 076 123 5397 @jess_untiedt_art

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Memos and Shifting Impressions

The core of my practice is informed by the act of collecting. This process avoids any formulaic or preconceived notions of categorisation. Rather, it can be seen as a sporadic investigation of objects that happen to compel me.

perfectly poised and curiously composed. It is through this arrangement of objects that I seek to construct a narrative – one which is open-ended.

Over time, I have come to recognise the connections between the discarded fragments that are constantly shifting through my studio space. Their original function has been rendered obsolete, and yet an underlying pathos can be read in their tampered and battered surfaces. In one moment, these things may be either hidden or scattered but, in another,

Curation is also a central component of this body of work. Inquisitiveness, a sensibility to the objects and the process of formal play between different methods of representation all perform an essential part in my curatorial process. It is my hope that the viewer can participate in my investigations into the messy and poetic possibilities

in perceiving these things, from their tactility and fragility to their shifting temporality. How we witness a thing can emerge and develop over time, an impression that always shifts and is never final. The mystery of these items can thus be found in their impressions, shadows or echoes, as the objects take on a different form and allow us to see them in a new light. 1.

From the series Order of events 2019 Lithographic print 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 5

Rendering, 2019 Mixed media Dimensions variable

Installation view, 2019 Dimensions variable

Untitled (how long is a piece of string), 2019 Monotype on newsprint Dimensions variable

From the series Order of events, 2019 Lithographic print 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 5

References 1 Steyerl, H. 2006. ‘The Language of Things’. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. 3: 359

CAPTIONS

A thing is never just an object, but a fossil in which a constellation of forces are petrified. Things are never just inert objects, passive items or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly changed. Hito Steyerl1

The materials tell their own story. What I am trying to do is merely to link them, to create a dialogue, a language even, between these objects – among themselves and with the viewer. Walter Benjamin notably said that all history is a pile of rubble. All material objects hold within them a story, a fleeting historical moment which can be unearthed or revealed. This idea serves as an undercurrent which echoes throughout my practice in the various disciplines of printmaking, photography, assemblage and bookmaking.

KERRY LEE CHAMBERS

Where to begin? How long is a piece of string?

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Homely

In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, what I find haunting is the way she describes the wallpaper as

a being. I use this concept in my work to create chewed-up and tumbling forms made of fabric and materials of the home which cluster together like large growths. By playing with scale, saturated colours and accumulation, my work becomes inviting but at the same time repulsive. These bright, appealing but chaotic forms also illustrate that there is a point at which obsession and compulsion can take over comfort and coping. Referencing hoarding specifically, I am interested in the idea that the simple act of collecting can, through accumulation, bring eventual suffocation. The Rocking Chair perfectly describes the delicate balance of ease and survival. The act of rocking is soothing, but it also can be seen as a symptom of extreme anxiety. The motion of rocking is inherently repetitive and can easily become obsessive. Desperate rocking to try and calm oneself, in contrast with a mother rocking her baby, shows the moment at which the comfortable becomes uncomfortable. The shapes that cover the chair are a response

to the repetitive act of rocking. They also reference the desire to sit in the comforting pillows, when in reality the chair is uninhabitable. If your compulsion forces you to sit, you will be swallowed whole. By deconstructing objects of the home, and exposing interiors through the use of plastics, this helps us consider the role they play in our lives. The overwhelming reproduction of these shapes and the difficulty in understanding highlight our desperate need to be in control. The reconfiguration of these emotions into new objects demonstrates the fragility of home and the potential they have as new tools in understanding our relationship to our home. 1.

Rocking Chair, 2019 Fabric, Polyfilla 150 x 99 cm

Untitled, 2019 Fabric, Polyfilla 200 x 90 cm

Untitled, 2019 Plastic, foam chips Dimensions variable

CAPTIONS

I focus on physical elements of the home, particularly in relation to our bodies, and exaggerate them to bring attention to the odd forms of comfort, protection and purity we try to construct. The physical and psychological comforts of home can aid us in dealing with life, although sometimes over-compensation spills into self-destruction. This unhomely exposing of the interior is related to the idea of losing control of our environment, reinforcing the struggle to stay in control. I explore compulsions and making/creating as coping mechanisms centred in the home.

ABBEY GAGNE

Our understanding of home is associated with familiarity, comfort, routine and safety. It’s a space we are able to say is our own. When outside sources affect this, we feel threatened. The home’s original function is to house and protect, but the reality is that it cannot always do this.

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The Secret Garden

The notion of the ‘Secret Garden’ pertains to the phenomenon of an isolated natural world in which one houses one’s most veiled desires, dreams and truths. The Garden, as a pensive platform of tranquillity, thus functions as a reflection of its subject’s consciousness, where the latter’s innermost vulnerabilities come together. With this year’s work, I reflect upon the ever-changing state of my own Secret Garden, using it as a contemplative space of beauty in which to interrogate the many enigmatic dynamics of intimacy. I view the garden as a liminal place, where contrasting emotions of trauma and longing exist hand-in-hand with moments of stillness, using the theme of intimacy as a point of convergence. The sensation of intimacy is beautiful, like no other, yet it holds the greatest capacity for violence, and for trauma.

These works refer to various intimate intersections, observing the tenuous subtleties of desire, longing, love and heartbreak. The medium of printmaking has allowed me to convey these themes most aptly – the works displayed here are products of offset lithography. A great deal of inspiration is sourced from fifteenth century Indian and Persian miniatures, with a similar usage of contour and intricacy applied in my own work. Picturesque environments are scattered with homo-erotic figures in ambiguous trysts, simmering with tension (and modica of pain), while other works take on degrees of self-portraiture. The many hues of blue reflect the melancholy with which they are usually associated, while also occupying a more harmonious space of romance and seduction. But, regardless of their reading, these colours signify the infinite space of the Secret Garden, opening a space of introspection and intimacy, permanent amid the tumult of human experiences. A carefully-cultivated garden should be able to accentuate the presence of

something mysterious or impenetrable hidden within the simple appearances of things. Here, intimacy coincides seamlessly with beauty and my own ideas of impermanence, expressing the attraction of a meditative environment, while also subtly exposing the vulnerability and violence which simmer beneath it. Raw emotions embed themselves in the leafy comfort of the garden, made indirect via the employment of delicate techniques – only revealing themselves to those who look close enough. Cruelty and apprehension become intertwined with lust and love; they take root within the inhabitants of the Garden, echoed visually via tropes of layering, repetition and occasional overgrowth. Bodies twist and contort in the same manner as the flowers and surrounding plant life, caught in a permanent flux. The works allude directly to violence, while being understood through beauty.

Though my beloved thinks of me as dirt and dust (detail), 2019 Offset lithograph on Fabriano Unica 300 gsm 94 x 36 cm

Breaking my face in was the kindest touch you ever gave, cremate me after you cum on my lips, 2019 Offset lithograph on Fabriano Unica 300 gsm 48 x 22 cm

The tear-drop / self-portrait from the series Grief & Lust Meet Under a Moonlit Sky, 2019 Digital lithograph on Munken Pure 300 gsm 70 x 50 cm

CAPTIONS

Gardens furthermore directly represent the marriage of man and nature. They exist defined by their boundaries, set around them to keep the world at bay, while still intrinsically connected to it. The Garden finds stillness as a kind of energy within the raging world which surrounds it; the two opposites

function as a mutualistic pair. Mortality – conjoined with experiences of melancholy, anguish and yearning – is balanced by the harmony found within the Garden’s space, thereby adding to the moments of quiet found within.

SHAKIL SOLANKI

But then something does take his hand, and how to reconcile his desperate passion with this unknown, sinister beauty, he is not sure.

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Sanitatem

As active agents, most domestic cleaning products used as an art medium cannot always be contained, undergoing constant alteration on the canvas over time. It is intriguing to me how most things change and deteriorate over time. I wanted to make artwork that also transforms over time, because there is both a beauty and melancholy in change. The unpredictable nature of liquid medicine and bleach flowing across the surface and sinking into the canvas

is important to my work because it evokes the organic nature of bodies, skin and wounds. I have through art making become a lot more accepting of myself, and realise that my anxiety comes from the same place that my sensitivity comes from, which is what allows me to create, find solace and to become more patient and compassionate with myself and others.

Ruin, 2019 Black ink, acrylic paint, glue, plasters, copper wire, blue thread, bleach, fabric softener 68 x 120 cm

Pain, 2019 Mercurochrome, gentian violet, fabric softener, copper wire, blue thread, green soap, coffee, plasters, white acrylic paint 150 x 170 cm

Peace, 2019 Plasters, paper tape, micropore tapes, elastic crepe bandage, steel wool, safety pins, scissors, dried lavender, scouring pad, blue thread, copper wire 72 x 120 cm

Departure, 2019 Body lotion, purple lip balm, multi-purpose oil, mercurochrome, OMO capsule, fabric softener, purple and green soap, plasters, copper wire, blue thread 60 x 60 cm

CAPTIONS

I use household cleaning materials and first aid supplies as mark-making tools because I am fascinated with the fact that most cleaning supplies can kill harmful bacteria while also potentially having detrimental effects on our

physical bodies. I find it interesting when something has the dual ability to both heal and hurt. In its extremes, bleach and most other domestic cleaning supplies are associated with radical cleansing, eliminating organic matter and bodily traces. In my work, the chemical reaction of medicines and cleaning supplies on the canvas suggests the ironically destructive nature of products that would otherwise represent a healing force. Hence this is a reminder of the strength, potency and potentially damaging elements of the substances we use to heal our bodies and clean our homes.

EDEN THEYS

I am interested in evoking ideas around pain, trauma and healing through my work, as I find scars and wounds to be beautiful reminders of past painful memories; they are the physical manifestation of the fact that a person has survived. I view displaying a scar as an act that invites others into oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal space. Therefore I consider the showing of scars and wounds as an act of vulnerability, and a way to connect to others through sharing pain and memories. I view the surface of my work as a type of skin which I first wound, and then try my best to heal or fix, through the use of first aid supplies and stitching. The canvas surface also reminds me of bandages that have desperately been trying to hold a wound together. Thus my work is an expression of my need to connect with others, as well as a personal act of vulnerability.

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Temporal Acts

Contemplate the egg. Really consider it. A strange object. The funny conundrum of the egg: it has to be used or it turns rotten; the chick has to break the egg to be born; you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs; the last one is a rotten egg. There is so much possibility in eggs. So much potential in their matter: the shell, the colour, the membrane, the white and yolk. You will find the egg shell in all its glory, but not the whole egg. Eggs are used in cooking, in painting, as a binder. They hold a lot of promise and are stronger than they seem.

Ever since I was young, I have continuously collected things. I was called a Little Magpie. I still unconsciously perform this activity. Collecting is a time to fill one’s thoughts with curiosity: should I turn over that shiny object half-hidden in the sand? Or pick up that peculiar looking piece of white? A treasure hunt. And so the catalyst of this project was born. My practice involves collecting, the subject of the object and its connections to the mind and body. I essentially glorify the discarded/left-over/looked over. Collection is the main drive for this project. What is a sculpture, after all, without material? A concept. The final conclusion could be the circle of life and death: the seashell becomes the sand. Why repair eighteen egg shells? Striving for the perfect egg. How do you

like your eggs? Perfect. A pointless effort against its final form (disintegrated)? Vulnerability. Fragility. Time. Reduction: words that work to describe my artwork and its style. The ideas I make take a lot of time, and their production requires patience and fine motor movements. This creates a sense of control of the material and of the product. The process of the work is its driving force. Each work stems from another through this process and the force of working. One thing leads to another, especially when the material is both the limit and guide put into a structure and format – that of the grid and square. 1.

Tempera, 2019 Various crushed shells and crustaceans on canvas 42 x 42 cm 1 of a series of 9

Pierce, 2019 Pins, acrylic paint, plaster of Paris 42 x 42 cm

Peel, 2019 Pins, egg membranes, plastic, newsprint on mounting board 60 x 60 cm

Tempera, 2019 Various crushed shells and crustaceans on canvas 42 x 42 cm

References 1 Brown, B. 2001. Thing Theory.

CAPTIONS

This exhibition is a statement about control of materials, among other things. It is a display of the versatility of the egg, among other subjects. If you observe, the works have their basis in structural foundations/systems/numberings, which thus become an underlying theme. An example can be seen in Tempera, where I have hand-ground collected items, such as shells and crustaceans, to make

a palette of sample colours in small circles, and then placed those circles on a square canvas. This goes back to the basics of painting and shapes: the circle and the square and their relationship. I reference Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, and relate the work to historical painting methods, such as that of grinding pigments to make paint, and using egg shells and egg yolk to bind the pigments to make egg tempera.

JESSICA UNTIEDT

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us. Bill Brown1

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133 JESSICA UNTIEDT

Emma Blencowe

Philip Steele

pg.136

pg.148

Ulriche Jantjes

Paul Wallington

pg.140

pg.152

SUPERVISED BY VIRGINIA MACKENNY

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART pg.144

Chelsea Peter

Emma Blencowe

Philip Steele

pg.136

pg.148

Ulriche Jantjes

Paul Wallington

pg.140

pg.152

CONTACT DETAILS

Chelsea Peter

Emma Blencowe emmablencowe.art@gmail.com 082 959 5801 @emma_blencowe pg.144 Ulriche Jantjes ulrichejantjes8@gmail.com 079 699 4227 @ulriche.studiowork

Chelsea Peter chels.peter96@gmail.com 082 482 5959 @chelsea__peter / @seafunk__

Philip Steele philipsteeleart@gmail.com 072 519 6226 @philipsteeleart

Paul Wallington paul.wallington990@gmail.com 073 424 0718 paulwallington.co.za @paul_wallington_paintings

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Weight(less)

Large, fleshy bodies do not fit into the spaces in our world that have been allocated to them. These bodies drip over seats, fill up beds, burst out of clothing. Fat bodies refuse to be contained, while society desperately tries to control and restrain them. Every magazine is filled to the brim with diet adverts and rakethin models with stretch mark-free skin. Even as things begin to change, with the rise of the body positivity movement, celebrating being fat is still an act of rebellion in a society that refuses to reward anything going against the archaic notions of beauty.

In my work, I celebrate the fat form in all its glory, while also trying to explore what it means to exist as one. My work references weight-loss television programmes and BBW porn stars, as I think these two areas are sites where fat women are represented in a contradictory way – condemned and pitied yet also sexualised. I use food colouring to describe these forms, and they burst with different hues and energy. They are silhouetted in a way, stripped of their identity, yet none could be the same because of the nature of the medium. In Limbo, my figures are flying/falling, rising/crashing. They exist in limbo – between heaven and hell. I also make large glue and food colouring forms, such as Gateway. I have been fascinated by stained-glass windows as sites of translation – places where, traditionally, scripture was turned into pictures for the multitudes, so they could understand what the clergy was saying in Latin. My windows are made of glue, flexible and smooth, with an almost fleshy feel to them. Just like the

fat body, they ooze out of the boundaries of the frame, or are contained but ripped, scarred and imperfect like flesh, stretched across the frame. The religious connotations in a lot of my work are an attempt to connect the feeling of judgement often found in religion, but now imposed upon fat people by the more secular society we live in currently. This is why I am interested in the concepts of heaven/hell, damned/ divine, angelic/demonic – opposites tied into the paradox that being fat is. My work is a celebration, a statement, a contradiction trying to explore what it means to exist as a fat woman.

Limbo, 2019 Food colouring on Fabriano paper 140 x 120 cm

Gateway, 2019 Food colouring, glue, wooden window frame 120 x 100 cm

Lust, 2019 Food colouring on Fabriano paper 21 x 29.7 cm

Gateway (detail), 2019 Food colouring, glue, wooden window frame Detailed view

Disorder, 2019 Food colouring on Fabriano paper 29.7 x 21 cm

References 1 ‘Song of Myself, Part 51’

CAPTIONS

This means that the fat body is an abject body, an othered body. This is a body that sits on an edge and that most interests me in my work. Fat bodies are seen as innocent and childlike, yet also sinful and disgusting. Fat people are judged as lazy, yet laughed at while doing any activity. Fat women, in particular, exist in this state of contradiction, as the society we live in ties a woman’s worth to her beauty. ‘Beauty’ here can be read as thin, smoothskinned, white, tall, European-featured and controlled by diet culture. Because they are rejecting the mandate of thinness (which is a form of control), fat women

are seen as deeply unattractive – yet the BBW (Big Beautiful Women) category on porn sites is one of the most-watched categories. Sexualised, condemned, infantilised, judged, fetishised, pitied and laughed at – this mess of incongruities is what it means to exist as a fat woman.

EMMA BLENCOWE

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman1

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Has the pear fallen far from the tree?

The works which have materialised this year seek to blur the line between sculpture and painting, as a strategy to

Family Values in Three Parts, for example, epitomises the manipulation of a conventional structure. The idea for this work was to pervert the meaning of the kitchen table in the domestic scene. The shape of the table is inspired by an existing table which belonged to my grandparents. I appreciate the kitchen table as a site which nurtured the bond I have with my family. It has been a symbol of my relationship with my loved ones, as well as the place which introduced me to many aspects of my heritage by means of oral histories and collective memories shared over meals at the table. My intention for this piece was to destabilise the certitude of the kitchen table as an institution connecting the family. By splitting the table into three parts, I am accentuating the unreliability of the conventional and familiar. The components of the split table are no longer functional, as the table-tops lie slanted.

Family Values in Three Parts forms part of an exhibition of works making use of both juxtaposition and subtlety. The visual lexicon I created utilises materials such as mohair wool, wire, wood and steel. The attraction of these materials lies in the variety of textures and forms which these resources provide. I am interested in the potential for these materials to evoke both visual and tactile sensations in the relationship between the delicate and rigid aspects of the works. The exchange between works of contrasting effects intends to introduce the potential for the contrasting textures or marks to encapsulate the tensions and sensitivities inherent within the home.

Untitled Chair Piece, 2019 Found chair back & dowel sticks Dimensions variable

Family Values in Three Parts, 2019 Oak & cherry wood Dimensions variable Photograph by the artist

Untitled, 2019 Door knobs & mohair wool on canvas 82 x 211 cm

Envisioning the Chair Piece, 2019 Oil on canvas 101 x 76 cm

Untitled, 2019 Door knobs & mohair wool on canvas 82 x 211 cm

CAPTIONS

I have perceived the home as a combination of collective memories, oral history, and the traditions and cultures instilled during childhood. I began contemplating the home as part and parcel of my heritage and, because it is where my history was introduced to me, I found it a suitable theme underpinning the further exploration of this. Researching a subject as familiar and intimate as the home was initially approached with an opaque lens. In an attempt to counter this opacity, I manipulated the objects and furniture I associated with the stability of the domestic interior. I altered conventional forms associated with the home in order for them to become depictions of wavering security and comfort. Dwelling within this obscured version of the household revealed the fragility of structures as influential as the home.

enhance the feeling of ambivalence. I am interested in the intimacy of the home as a place which reveals the essence of our relationship with our heritage as embodied by the traces and collective memories embedded in the domestic space. I have utilised forms of furniture associated with family gatherings and oral history to subvert the stability usually found in their existence. By working with the manipulation of these forms, I attempt to question the comfort we acquire from familiar contexts such as the home.

ULRICHE JANTJES

My practice is inspired by notions of heritage and the home. I consider the home as an archive of sorts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a reflection of the customs and culture introduced in the past. My heritage stems from the engagement between the Khoisan and German missionaries, and thus I am interested in the contrasting effects the church has had on indigenous inhabitants of South Africa, as well as the influence it has in shaping the conditions of the home.

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The Man, the Self and the Shadow

This art is not created from an outside space looking in, but is rooted in a slightly more complicated position: being a part of this system, stuck in it, feeling some kind of individuality and freedom of expression because of it, but still being aware of the fact that this sense of freedom and individuality is sold to us by advertisers in order to get us to spend more, feel less and contribute to economic wealth, which perpetuates a cycle that empowers the Man – the imperialist, the capitalist, the fascist, the racist, the destroyer.

I play with the concept of ugly truths hidden behind eye-catching, seemingly beautiful and curious fronts. This is communicated as a visual story through my compositions and choice of painted objects, as well as through the choice of materials used, which are seductive but are also fundamentally toxic waste products. Glitter is sold to us as a ‘feminine’ product, so the use of glitter in certain artworks addresses issues of the sexualisation, fetishisation and objectification of womxn and femme bodies. These works reference sexualised advertising and pornography, and the effect they have on the way society views these bodies, which creates toxic thought patterns and ways of seeing. These artworks also critique the way in which we perpetuate an unrealistic body image to fit into society’s standards and conform to the male gaze for male pleasure.

Light, shiny objects and reflections are prevalent within my work. As Aldous Huxley writes in The Doors of Perception: And Heaven and Hell, ‘Shiny objects may remind our unconscious of what it enjoys at the mind’s antipodes, and these obscure intimations of life in the Other World are so fascinating that we pay less attention to this world and so become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.’ The irony is that, although the colours and shiny materials may in some way be transporting and draw attention away from what presently is, the artworks themselves are depictions of this world’s harsh reality, which is disconnected from the Other World Huxley describes. Each piece contains a dark truth about self and society. Our external world, the systems in place, our behaviour, choices and unethical consumption rooted in ego are what need attention and action for change to occur.

Lost and found on a road that inevitably ends and starts with you, 2019 Oil on canvas 168 x 119 cm

Bunnymen, 2019 Oil and glitter on canvas 153 x 122 cm

Still Hungry?, 2019 Oil and acrylic on canvas, tin can, glass wine bottle, resin, cigarettes 30 x 7 cm, 40 x 40 cm, 14 x 7.5 cm

CAPTIONS

Whether or not there exists a universal truth, my conscious and unconscious search for it infiltrates my work. Documentaries and books hold philosophies, facts and themes which spill onto whatever I am painting. This body of work revels in the reality of our existence being consumer-based, unnaturally toxic, self-absorbed, and yet so disconnected from the inner self or something greater.

The language I use in my artworks draws on the language of the media and advertising world, which is bold, confrontational and demands our attention. I use oil paint, resin, glitter, acrylic paint and other media to create surreal, disconcerting compositions which are visually vibrant and tantalising, in order to capture the viewers’ attention, in imitation of techniques consistently used in advertising and historically used in propaganda.

CHELSEA PETER

This body of work reflects my wildly privileged lived experience and my journey of learning and unlearning what has been projected onto my mind since coming into this existence. Here, our lives are based on consumption. We live in a society where the stuff we own is seen as somewhat more defining of our character than our actions or morals, which is why I use objects to depict the subject. Existing in a capitalist, consumer-based system is a significant theme of my work.

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The Truth Is Not Pornographic

My community is depicted as walking embodiments of our sexuality, as if being gay is the sum of what we are. But we are not actually allowed to be sexual. In a society that is often plagued with the overwhelming presence of sex, gay sexuality and its representation are still forbidden, only whispered.

I uncover treasured artefacts hidden under beds and sock drawers. In my work, I monumentalise these historical, culturally-relevant objects, these prized possessions which would be shared and exchanged only with the trusted. Objects of veneration that would result in incarceration in many countries – though gay pornography can provide a celebratory safe space to explore gay sexual identity, record actual expressions of gay sexuality and desires, and be a platform for safe sex education and pleasure that is guilt-free and liberated. My work is developed within a conceptual framework. Much like an archeologist digging, sifting, cleaning, cataloguing, considering, I work within strict processes and regimented phases of development. First, I collect as much visual information as possible on my chosen subject. This is then catalogued in a system of my choosing. Next, I consider the relationships between these visuals, and make combinations

and collages. The resulting images are then re-made into finished watercolours, photographs, paintings and installations. Basically, my work is contradictory. I take the resulting collages of my process and re-enact them to create a ‘new’ image which both acknowledges and critiques the problems of so-called pornography, and even art history itself. I attempt to arrest exotification, exploitation, denial of certain bodies and stereotyping. My process allows me to control at least some of the mechanisms of how I am presented, perceived and exist. I am the researcher who breaks the cardinal rule of not influencing the study subject. I purposefully come into contact and impact, influence and attempt to change. I see this as my unapologetic gesture to the representation of acts of gay desire, lust and love.

Big Boys Getting Pumped, 2019 Acrylic, ink and pencil on canvas 200 x 150 cm

Be Long To Me, 2019 Acrylic, ink and pencil on canvas 200 x 150 cm

Suck, 2019 Acrylic, ink and pencil on canvas 200 x 150 cm

CAPTIONS

My source material is early twentieth century gay ‘adult’ and physical culture magazines. As much as these publications contributed to keeping homosexuality in the public realm, ironically they had to practise selfcensorship, in order to remain published. They had to disguise their desires under the pretense of being inconspicuous body building magazines.

Where do these codes of representation come from? How were they applied and why? What was the need for a language that both suppressed and celebrated the very thing it represented? How does this impact the empowerment and disempowerment of gay identity?

PHILIP STEELE

My work is not a simple representation of gay identity or desire. My focus is a deconstruction of the mechanisms of visual language as they pertain to gay representation, in order to understand the systems that construct and define gay identity. My work investigates the problematics of how codified symbols and metaphors represent same-sex male desire, in an attempt to recognise, elevate and insert untold narratives into the accepted Western art canon, ensuring a more inclusive, truer telling of the history of art and culture.

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Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings (c. 1819-1823) have been re-interpreted time and time again because of their elusive nature and powerful imagery, which looks at themes of suffering, violence, witchcraft and death. Even though they are not explicit about the wars of the early 1800s and the aftereffects, these paintings are a direct result of that historical period. Similarly, many of J.M. Coetzee’s books, written during apartheid, have little or no explicit connection with the apartheid regime but, when acknowledged as being a product of the time in which they were written, they become even more powerful because they are not overtly didactic in their message. These works force the viewer or reader to come to their own conclusions, filling in the imaginative gaps.

painting is an act of translation, an act of transference, connection and displacement. For to translate is to shift from one language or ground to another there can be no purely exact movement from one condition to the next. With this translation comes the challenge of disrupting South Africa’s constructed and untrustworthy historical narrative, which J.M. Coetzee talks about in his book White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. The excerpts that I take from these specific books help me understand something that perhaps goes beyond a simple explanation. In whatever small way, these words attempt to do something that I am not able to do on my own, to make me feel things I would not have felt, and for this I feel less alone. They attempt to explain what it means to live in a place ‘as irresistible as it is unlovable’ (J.M. Coetzee quoted in David Attwell’s Doubling the Point, 1992).

I didn’t mean it, I loved you, that was why I did it, 2019 Oil on canvas 130 x 180 cm

An endless Sunday among thousands of our own kind, 2019 Oil on canvas 100 x 150 cm

There you strew cosmos over the blood ground, 2019 Oil on linen 50 x 38 cm

Untitled, 2019 Mixed media collage board 157 x 119 cm

CAPTIONS

My role as a painter looks at the idea of South African fiction, by translating specific passages into my works’ own narratives. Ashraf Jamal suggests in his essay ‘Chaotic Region’ (2018) that:

PAUL WALLINGTON

Vowels and history and the dead weight of the negligible story

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Caron Goedeman

Jared Leite

pg.158

pg.166

Sara Jardine

Aimee Messinger

pg.162

pg.170

SUPERVISED BY FABIAN SAPTOUW

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART

Caron Goedeman

Jared Leite

pg.158

pg.166

Sara Jardine

Aimee Messinger

pg.162

pg.170

CONTACT DETAILS

Caron Goedeman gdmcar002@myuct.ac.za 076 980 9303 @caronmargotgoedeman

Sara Jardine sjardine29@gmail.com

Jared Leite jaredleite21@gmail.com 081 303 7463 @babyfacedthebaptist

Aimee Messinger aimeemessinger@gmail.com 071 444 4116 @aimeemessinger

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Based on photographic archives from the maternal side of my family, these paintings are a way of remembering certain aspects of my childhood, the first twelve years of which I spent growing up in the rural village of Ebenhaeser, along the northwest Cape coastline. Like many other apartheid communities, the people of Ebenhaeser were evicted from some of its most fertile agricultural land in the mid-1920s. This was to make way for an all-white agricultural settlement scheme in terms of the then-government’s poor white upliftment programmes.

Beyond this, there is however something unmistakably eerie in the representation

For all the emphasis put on the bodies of children as the main point of engagement for the viewer, and for the agency they seem to convey, the children are not masters of their own place and fate. I therefore present in some artworks children who appear more adult-like. Conversely, I portray some adults as children, with foreshortened bodies. Through this, I am playing with the dualistic relationship between adult and child. In reflecting on the circumstances of that time, I aim to draw out an underlying history of lost, and also to draw the necessary connections to the place as a strong signifier of that shift. It is equally important to read the paintings as emphasising how we hold on to identities formed from the land. Beyond eating and surviving, the planting of the land is also about maintaining family ties and transcending

earlier displacement. It is to this end that I placed beds of soil, referencing land and community subsistence farming, in the gallery space. The work is an engagement with the inkommer and oorspronklike Ebenyer divide that started to raise its head as community members began positioning themselves in anticipation of restitution proceeds. Opting for the return of the land they lost in the 1920s instead of monetary compensation, the community wanted to portray as their main concern the future of their children and further generations. This noble motivation is, however, not borne out by present-day machinations and conflicts within the community over access to immediate restitution proceeds. The centring of the children in these paintings is therefore also an attempt to refocus the community’s view of the land as a tool for carrying both generational wealth and historical legacy.

Oes, 2019 Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 66 x 75.8 cm

Verlossing (Redemption), 2019 Acrylic and ink on canvas 66 x 75.8 cm

Rein (Pure), 2019 Transfer and other mixed media on canvas 68.8 x 57.2 cm

Eien (Taking Ownership), 2019 Acrylic on canvas 50 x 50 cm

CAPTIONS

I want to convey a message counter to the discourse of victimisation, loss and defeat, in terms of which the community’s history has come to be constructed almost exclusively, by showing the strength of family ties, and the communities built around them – specifically focusing on the children found in these historical photographs. Instead of the more depressing narratives, the children in these paintings represent the purest of humanity, mostly untainted by the darker aspects of the stories of their parents and previous generations. While the land losses the community suffered brought a sense of despondency to many adults, the children instead convey a forward-looking hope and resilience, not buckling under pressure.

of the children – something that throws the binary presentation of life as either smooth sailing or struggles into complete disarray. Confronting any naive reading of the paintings is the staining of the printed photo on canvas, with the discolouration infringing on any simple narrative of innocence and play. The stain also becomes emblematic of the fading of memory. The loss of details due to the wear and tear of the photograph further advances the undoing of a simplistic reading of the paintings.

CARON GOEDEMAN

The Lingering Shadow: Effect and the Non-Human in Painting Ebenhaeser

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Dala wat you must

The installations are in public spaces in order for them to be accessible to different people, not just those who know about art galleries. It’s for the ouens. Since the installations are in public spaces, I have no control over what happens to them. I like the idea that, once I place the installation, it has its own narrative which the community decides. If someone loves it enough to take it, then it can be part of their narrative. I hope that the object will serve as a marker for that person of that exact moment, in that exact place in time.

As a person of colour, representation is important, because our history has been morphed, erased or completely disregarded. I refuse to be ignored. I refuse to be embarrassed by how I conduct myself. My entire life, I have been told ‘Don’t talk like that’, ‘Don’t be so gham’. Growing up, I understood the word ‘gham’ to mean someone who is rough, doesn’t speak proper English and is from the Cape Flats. It was a bad thing to be called gham. I was embarrassed when people asked me ‘Why are you so gham?’. But this is who I am. Now I am proud of how I speak. This is how I choose to express myself. My installations consist of miniature shoes that exist in the real world. However, there is only one of each. There are no pairs, to show that, even though

we have this insane start, there is a limit to mobility – but there is a start. I want to create a conversation among the people who are still living with the repercussions of the past, and to encourage the youth to see the world in a new light, while being aware of how we got here. My shoe stores have been named Dala wat you must because it is a term of action. I have been saying ‘Dala wat you must’ probably since Grade 3. There is no official definition of the word ‘dala’; the best I can describe it is as ‘do’ or ‘act’. Whenever you do something, stik uit and dala wat you must. No time for pussy-footing around. It is time the world sees the powerhouse the Cape Flats really is.

Angry Princess, 2019 Polymer clay 4 x 5 cm

2-3.

Dala wat you must, 2019 Mixed media 13 x 28 x 37 cm

4-5.

Sneakers, 2019 Polymer clay and Perspex Each sneaker: 2.5 cm Perspex shelf: 12 x 18 cm

CAPTIONS

My work is inspired by Riyadh Roberts, aka YoungstaCPT. His mission is to tell the story of Cape Town from a Capetonian’s perspective. He has become someone who Capetonians can look up to, especially the younger generation of people of colour. YoungstaCPT was born in Cape Town.

Raised in Wittebome and Wynberg, Youngsta gives a tour of the current state of South Africa and Cape Town, in which he discusses a city that is still deeply affected by apartheid spatial planning, socio-economic inequality and gang violence. He wants to change how people in the Cape Flats are seen and how many people feel about themselves. Youngsta is an example who claims who he is unapologetically.

SARA JARDINE

I have placed installations around Cape Town which remind people that our reality is what we make it. I have made miniature shoe stores because sneakers play a role in our daily lives. Sneakers are kak expensive, but what makes them insane is what we do with them: they form part of my identity because I choose how to represent myself.

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Amalgam

being. Windows take on many forms and are designed in reference to a vast range of cultural motifs. By redesigning the window in ways which combine Eastern and Western styles, I hope to provide a viewpoint which figuratively frames my identity and heritage. I intend to establish a new narrative, one which incorporates references to details of an arduous past alongside current resonant material, in an attempt to communicate the confusion surrounding my own social perception. My work is about the shame and frustration linked with the expression of cultural identity that can be traced throughout South African history. It is the pursuit of a deeper understanding of the vagaries of the past, and engages with layering, metaphors and symbols as a means of allowing a wide scope of contentious ideas and images into a singular conversation.

Culmination (diptych), 2019 Offset lithograph on Munken 118.8 x 84.1 cm Edition of 8 + 1 AP Photograph by the artist

Compass, 2019 Acetone transfer and ink marker on Munken 52 x 52 cm Photograph by the artist

Detail of Transparent (hexaptych), 2019 21 x 14.8 cm (each) Laser cut paper and digital collage layered between A4 Perspex Photograph by the artist

Once Upon A Time (diptych), 2019 Digital print on Munken Pure 84 x 59.4 cm Edition of 1 + 1 AP

CAPTIONS

Not unlike the story of my heritage, my perception of self is vastly confused. Within this body of work I consider the window as a viewpoint which frames fragments of space and history, for the purpose of representing the collisions that brought my cultural identity into

JARED LEITE

For so long, I have hoped that selfexpression would help me decipher the essence of who I am – believing that identity and expression were co-dependent. It was the pursuit of art that dissolved these ideas. Observing the distance between all expression and work that is perceived as art was something that shifted my understanding. I have noticed that the merchandising of one’s culture is in some ways paramount to success for artists of colour; however the construction of the ‘coloured’ identity and the erasing of mixed-race histories has left me no definitive culture to sell.

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Let There Be Life

Through the rendering of what I have named ‘atmospheric abstractions’, my

Proceeding toward a lighter setting, An Illuminated Glimmer is layered with more brightness and vitality. The colours have added saturation, and specks of light pierce through the brooding atmosphere. There is an element of stillness in this work, a hovering energy which can either explode with pure lightness or implode with the darkness surrounding this radiance. This push and pull of ideas further justifies the ambiguous characteristic of the Sublime – is it fear or awe?

Unpacking the Sublime through historical research and art-making, I have attempted to create my own definition. The Sublime is an emotional experience that is vast, overwhelming, inspiring, breath-taking, terrifying and formless; a sensation that has the power to bring about a strong wave of emotions. This sensation can be light or dark but, most importantly, it has the power to invoke in one the sensation of feeling alive and interconnected with all else that breathes. This ultimate sensation of being moved by or in awe of something will hopefully instil a complete awareness of and appreciation for being alive, along with everything else that breathes too.

Attempting to Overcome the Dark, 2019 Oil on canvas 120 x 180 cm

An Illuminated Glimmer, 2019 Oil on canvas 120 x 180 cm

Untitled (detail), 2019 Oil on canvas 120 x 180 cm

Untitled, 2019 Ink and bleach on paper 14.6 x 21 cm Photograph by the artist

CAPTIONS

The sense of being overwhelmed is the core idea of the Sublime, an aesthetic concept rooting itself in classical Greece and branching out into eighteenth century philosophical discourse. The Sublime can be used to describe great works of art, literature and the natural world. The Sublime has the power of engulfing the senses, transporting the viewer into a state of sudden, intense feeling. Feelings of fear and awe are often also at the forefront of Sublime experiences. If one of the roles of art is to inspire emotion, I use notions of the Sublime to anchor the theory behind my practice.

body of work references notions of the Sublime in its scale, formlessness and ambiguity. Beginning with a multitude of small ink drawings, my practice has grown into large-scale oil paintings which measure 120 x 180cm, having the ability to overwhelm the viewer through size alone. Especially when observed from up close, the landscape orientation somewhat engulfs the space around one, drawing the viewer into a relatively uncertain scene. Attempting to Overcome the Dark draws inspiration from fear – a fear of inadequacy, a fear of the unknown, a fear of what will happen if we do not change our ways. A fear we have all experienced before. Darkness encroaches on the majority of the plane, creating a presence of uncertainty and chaos. However, the dim scene is made lighter by a faint illumination, its glow fighting what could completely be overshadowed. This softly ignites the flame of hope.

AIMEE MESSINGER

Let There Be Life is a progression towards lightness, with whatever connotations you’d like to attach to the word. For me, it is about a journey towards life, hope for the recovery of Earth, love, acceptance, gratitude, and a deep-seated appreciation for living, and everything that it encapsulates and involves. My body of work was founded on a Breath. A Breath of Life so overwhelming that it created a sense of what it truly means to be alive. A Breath that goes unappreciated until it might be the last. How can one preserve this feeling and drop its essence into the mundane, allowing it to dissolve into a perpetual state of gratitude and self-assured existence?

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AIMEE MESSINGER

Kino Hogan

pg.176

Anitha van Deventer

pg.184

Mia Lรถtter

Lรกura Viruly

pg.180

pg.188

SUPERVISED BY JOHANN VAN DER SCHIJFF

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN FINE ART

Kino Hogan

pg.176

Anitha van Deventer

pg.184

Mia Lรถtter

Lรกura Viruly

pg.180

pg.188

CONTACT DETAILS

Kino Hogan kinoh4@gmail.com 081 740 5337 @kinohogan

Mia Lรถtter mia.lotter@gmail.com 071 416 8209 @mialotter_art

Anitha van Deventer anitha6kvd@gmail.com

Lรกura Viruly lviruly@gmail.com 072 097 0262 @lauraviruly_art

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Holy Shift

A Devil in the Detail in particular speaks to the use of religion in the materialisation of colonialism. While the physical build is unsuitable for its use as a modern, practical camping object, the symbol-laden velvet becomes the very walls of the structure used to provide comfort and shelter. Though it could protect someone from the sun, its use in protection from rain would be negligible. Therefore, if anything, it is suited singularly as sun protection, possibly for a sensitive-skinned Westerner. These structures function both as a dynamic site, but at the same time something very static in the ways they are built. The structures appear moveable, able to be packed up, yet their materials tell otherwise, lending them permanence and weight. They are ironic in that they are usually made to be relatively economical, weather-proof and durable, yet here they are made of sensitive and expensive fabric. The use of this material in these objects refers to the involvement of the church as a means of providing comfort for the coloniser, such as moral solace and rationalisation.

The maroon and metallic colours (included through material decoration and bronze) exist to create a sense of opulence in this environment. With colonialism also came a shift in the economic development of colonised societies. There was an injection of currency, institutions and wealth, and this site seeks to represent the presence of these. I feel that it is important to state that the use of the religion in my works has no intention of attacking the church and the religion in any way. Rather, it is to investigate and explore its historical use, in the way that it was misappropriated and twisted to fit the agenda of the West.

Camp Lamp, 2019 Laser-cut MDF wood, wood stain and found textured glass

A Devil in the Detail, 2019 Velvet, canvas, steel, Velcro, spray-paint and string 200 x 100 cm (Framed)

A Sweet Pandemic, 2019 Ciment fondu and interior wall paint Dimensions variable

Wooden Thurible, 2019 Laser Cut MDF wood, sprayed black

Restricted and Unfold-able, 2019 Velvet, wooden rods and bronze

CAPTIONS

A pitched camp is generally regarded as a settlement in a location, most likely temporary. Bound to the idea of religious and colonial settlement as it is, this campsite exhibits objects incorporating the influence of the visual language of the church. The maroon colour of the fabric speaks of sacrifice, leadership and royalty, especially European royalty. This particular colour velvet is also used for tithes in Christianity, specifically in the form of collection bags. These velvet bags are passed around a congregation to receive offerings, almost always money. A means of income for the church, a tithe is traditionally one tenth of a congregantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s overall income. Particularly in Catholicism (said to be the purest branch of Christianity), it was taught that it would be sacrilegious if

one held back from giving tithes, to the point that excommunication could be a consequence. Although this is something that is not as compulsory in the church in modern times, one can often feel pressured or guilted into it.

KINO HOGAN

Christianity is subtly intertwined with the agendas of the Western world. This body of work is centred on the movement of the church through Africa as a result of British and European imperialism. I wanted to investigate Christianity as a colonial residue â&#x20AC;&#x201C; something that had been manifested around the world as a result of colonialism â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and how the religion was used as a justification for the actions of the colonisers. The site I have created is representative of the movement of the church as well as what has been solidified in the spaces it occupies.

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The Only Way Out Is Through

In my installation I use this idea to create a mindscape, a pocket for the work to be experienced in. Here, the space is depicted as a surreal forest which can be explored and interacted with, much like the human experience of the mind. The mind, comparable to our shared reality on Earth, is its own dream-like world detailed with characters, settings and storylines. We live in one just as actively as the other, experiencing the joy of light and fear of darkness in both.

In many Western tales, the dark forest is a device used to represent the unknown. The first three stages of the hero’s journey outline how the hero must leave the comfort and familiarity of their known world and start their journey by entering the unknown or, in this case, the dark forest. The untamed outskirts of civilisation are where magical creatures, goddesses and gods can be found among wild animals, evil witches and demons. Behind the dark forest of doubt, fear and the unknown, however, lie blue skies, possibility, knowledge, satisfaction and fulfilment. I am looking therefore at the process of overcoming the desire for familiarity in pursuit of a higher level of self-actualisation. Overall, this piece represents my process of navigating the dark forest, the psychological landscape I sometimes find myself in, while detailing the process of moving out of my comfort zone and embracing the unknown so as to achieve growth and self-development. I’ve used surreal imagery to represent my feelings, habits and the lessons I’ve learned. It is about being in but, more importantly, moving through this space.

Isopod, 2019 Wood and material 162 x 162 x 162 cm Photograph by the artist

The Only Way Out Is Through, 2019 Mixed media Dimensions variable Photograph by the artist

Isopod, 2019 Wood and material 162 x 162 x 162 cm Photograph by the artist

Studio, 2019 Wood and clay Dimensions variable

Black Eyes, 2019 Clay 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 cm

Dark Forest Tree (detail), 2019 Cedar wood and clay Dimensions variable Photograph by the artist

CAPTIONS

These ideas are reflected in the work of Joseph Campbell. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell describes how the hero myth is the same intrinsic motif that has manifested in varying ways in many of the stories and myths from around the world since time immemorial. These narratives follow a similar twelve step progression that the hero undergoes on their journey, from the known world they live in, through the unknown, to complete a transformation of self so as to reach the goal of fulfilling their life’s purpose.

MIA LÖTTER

The forest is like the mind: filled with tranquil, light spaces but also those overwhelming and dark.

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Eco-Ability

ANITHA VAN DEVENTER

The title of my work, Eco-Ability, is developed from a fusion of the sources that inform my art practice, in order to describe the decisions and ideas behind my creative expression. The concept is utopian, because the term embraces the wish I have for healthy human and world conditions. For humans, who are the dominant species on our planet, to be of sound mind, body, spirit and – through this – my wish for a world with healthy ecosystems, created with love for future generations and co-species.

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With an emphasis on intuition and instinct, I have created a symbol within this for expressing what is felt and imagined. The allegory comes to life in the form of ceramic pots. Just as a plant would grow in a pot impelled by the uncontrolled forces of nature, the pot becomes a vessel for thought and the potential for that expression to exist – however it may be. As an articulation of acceptance and harmony, my work may thus look imperfect and informal.

the hands-on, immediate aspects of the process. As a further investigation into pottery as art therapy, I invited members of my class to join me in making pots. For many it was a calming experience. I find these characteristics of art therapy very apparent in my own clay work, but counter to this mode of fast expression is the slow process of weaving branches, which takes patience and the careful consideration of each individual acacia piece in order to create a structure.

‘Eco’ refers to my love for the Earth, my home, and for environmental and resource conservation. I use ‘Ability’ to suggest that humans are able to live in harmony with each other and the natural world, as well as to imply that individuals can be dis-abled through the lenses of human law.

Conservation is an important part of my work, and I have therefore collected wild clay to make the pots with. The procedure followed for the making of an individual pot starts with grinding the chunks of clay I’ve collected into a fine powder, in order to remove impurities like small stones – although sometimes I leave the stones in, because they are a beautiful part of nature.

My entire body of work, with its earthy coherency, is evidence of an art practice outside the margins of the current social structure and its commodities, as well as of the ability for humans to live in harmony with nature.

By conceptualising the desire for a healthier future, I have created a metaphorical space which is manifested in the sculptural form of a greenhouse. As one of my primary materials, I use acacia wood (an invasive species in South African indigenous biomes such as fynbos) for the construction of this greenhouse by weaving thin branches hand-picked from forests around Cape Town.

The intuitive and informal nature of my work suggests in many ways the phenomenon of Outsider Art. The artists who belong to this category make art outside of the formal fine art realm. Existing on the margins of society, these artists make art purely for selfexpression. This phenomenon and the practice of art therapy are very similar. Working with clay is known to enable self-expression fairly quickly because of

1-2. Woven Acacia, 2019 Acacia Saplings Pottery as Therapy, 2019 Clay

Art Therapy Investigation, 2019 Clay Photograph by the artist

Wild Clay Work, 2019 Clay Photograph by the artist

CAPTIONS

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the slow hounds

Post-apocalyptic theory often uses the discourse of the ‘artefact’ and how objects pertain to inconsistent memories post-trauma. Using and choosing found objects is an important part of my process, because the quality of materiality, the meaning in shape and sometimes mundanity are compelling to me. I hope to portray characters (dogs), their objects and landscape as a cosmos of signifiers, where no stipulated meaning limits access-points of interpretation. The apocalyptic (religious) language takes on concealed meanings using prophetic symbolism, much like how most successful assemblages

tend to create an image or form that transcends the identity of the individual objects used. I like to think in scrapyards, uncovering relics to bind them into new forms of different sense. The dogs have not lived autonomously from people but have not yet followed the human exodus, creating instead their own home on the outlands of the world’s end. They are dogs almost alien, that hopefully sit beyond anthropomorphic attributions. It is a sentimentality for these creatures, as well as an appreciation for their stray, crooked forms, that pushes me to create them. The sculptural dogs reflect the wretched state of the animal itself, vestiges of a now-untamed nature. They are lost survivors who track the last traces of human endeavour. The dogs don’t pity themselves. They play, they gnaw at their own limbs, and they linger wherever wakeful strays go, and go unseen.

The Slow Pup, 2019 Metal, felted wool, wax, found objects 43 x 78 x 30 cm

The Yeller Dog, 2019 Metal, felted wool, ball clay, wood, found objects 100 x 120 x 45 cm

Flag Pole and Collar, 2019 Metal, bronze, felted wool, wax, found objects 145 x 10 cm / 30 x 30 cm

The Sitter, 2019 Metal, felted wool, copper wire 72 x 42 x 20 cm Photograph by the artist

CAPTIONS

I couldn’t, however, place why their scrappy little bodies evoked a deep emotionality in me, until Jo Ractliffe in her print series Nadir brought them from the background to the foreground, collaged them immersed in dystopian wastelands. I began thinking of the stray dogs as the residue of human residence, the left-overs after human exodus. Furthermore, how these dogs could exist alongside the preoccupation within contemporary art and literature with how terminal post-war spaces mimic mythologies of the post-apocalyptic. The apocalyptic discourse, although religious and traditional, has been rebirthed, aided by post-apocalyptic theory, into a modern fascination with popular global doomsday rhetoric and anxieties, such as nuclear weapons and increasing environmental concerns. Thus my sculptural dogs, hollow and stumped, affected by some detrital landscape yet embodying a pathology of it, are characters in my own theorised and liminal post-apocalyptic myth. A myth I make in captivation with endings, ruptured spaces and their saviours.

Traditional apocalyptic literature, with its varied visuals of the weird and frightening as well as spectacles exploring the obtuse and grotesque, was my first theoretical grounding in conceptualising a nameless and somewhat timeless dystopia. The apocalyptic is an oracle of faith. It accepts the anxieties and horrors of the human world yet implores that, beyond a predetermined doomsday, is a new world, whereas the post-apocalyptic is not mentioned in religious texts, for it is a gap, the plague of pessimism. It is the uncertain period of disorder, after the Armageddon and before the Revelation, when normalised human systems of structure, morality and language degrade. The postapocalyptic relies on intrusions of memory, and depicts the existence of the world’s interim from (re)constructed artefacts of the pre-apocalyptic world.

LÁURA VIRULY

I’d seen them, countlessly. The dogs, with bent necks and black eyes. Sometimes not even rendered as dogs, but rather just the parts of their bodies that bulge with bone in rapid movement. They, through art, became icons of damaged life, the ragtag and motley escorts to human subjects. I seemed to have focused on them in the backgrounds of anti- and postapartheid art, and slowly grew an intense and almost uneasy infatuation with them.

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191 LÁURA VIRULY

Clifford Bestall

Oliver Hambsch

pg.194

pg.202

Loraine Boyle

pg.198

Eugene van der Merwe

pg.206

SUPERVISED BY STEPHEN INGGS, SVEA JOSEPHY, FRITHA LANGERMAN, VIRGINIA MACKENNY

POST-GRAD DIPLOMA IN FINE ART

Clifford Bestall

Oliver Hambsch

pg.194

pg.202

Loraine Boyle

pg.198

Eugene van der Merwe

pg.206

CONTACT DETAILS

Clifford Bestall bestall@iafrica.com 082 828 8331 @clifford.bestall

Loraine Boyle loraine.boyle@me.com 082 438 2659 @loraineboyle_artist

Oliver Hambsch oliver.hambsch@gmail.com 082 404 0676 @oliverhambschprints

Eugene van der Merwe eugene@eugenevandermerwe.com 082 335 4276 @eugenevdm

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Amanuensis for the Dead

He carries around within him a vast dark land: all the stories his mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he carries with him even those stories his mother never knew or heard of, he can’t get rid of them but he can’t lose them either. (Erpenbeck, The End of Days, 2013)

Anna was marked by these deaths. Throughout her life, she suffered bouts of uncontrollable and often violent anger. And it came, I believe, to affect my own life. But how, one might ask, could her loss influence her unborn son? Moments of unacknowledged trauma, the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham writes in his work on the postHolocaust generation, have the potency to create phantoms. A phantom is 'a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious for good reason... it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography' (Nicolas Abraham Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology, 1987). For this series, I take as my subject death and mourning – I give to my mother’s silent grief an image. The triptych Draped Mirror reveals the uncovering of a mirror in three movements, as a cloth is lifted from its surface. Following a death, it is custom for many to turn mirrors to the wall or obscure them from view, so that the soul, on leaving

the deceased’s body, does not become trapped in its own reflection. Mirrors, it is said, are a rent or leak between the two worlds that separate the living from the dead. In another sequence of images, Persephone's Veils, a veil falls to the ground, frozen in its movement to the ground as in the frames of a film. The surrounding darkness evokes the realm of Hades, the underworld of classical Greek mythology, where the goddess Persephone was held captive. The traumas of parents are the inheritance of their children, and our ancestral past is very much present in our own lives, though it often remains opaque. It requires, I believe, an historical excavation to bring to light the events that stain and strain so many relationships between parents and their children, just as my mother’s unspoken loss pushed us apart. Through an art practice that engenders research, acknowledgement and retrospection, I hope some form of reconciliation can be achieved.

1-2. Draped Mirror (diptych), 2019 Graphite frottage on cotton 96 x 73 cm (each) 3-5. Persephone's Veils (triptych), 2019 Graphite frottage on cotton 96 x 73 cm (each)

References Abraham, N. 1987. ‘Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology’. Critical Inquiry 13, no. 2: 287 Erpenbeck, J. 2013. The End of Days. Susan Bernofsky (translator). Boston: New Directions

CAPTIONS

An old family graveyard bounded by a highway lies outside Johannesburg. Its markers and stones are a testimony to the fact that what happened here, before public health and clean water, while a tragedy, must be considered unexceptional for the period. In April 1928, my mother, her ten siblings and her parents contracted enteric fever from contaminated drinking water. Six of the children died in hospital within days of one another. The rest survived.

Anna, my mother, was eight years old. When Anna was later released from hospital, she returned to the family farm, where she noticed that the graveyard was unusually busy. At the time she knew nothing of the deaths of her brothers and sisters, and received evasive answers when she asked what was going on. Then, only weeks after the deaths of her children, Anna’s mother died in childbirth.

CLIFFORD BESTALL

Returning to the past, I find in my own history a site of unacknowledged pain laid bare. It belongs to me, yet it is not mine. It is my mother’s pain – a figure from whom I am largely estranged. The individual images in this series are made manifest through a haptic process: one in which touch, trace and exploration reveal that which is opaque, hidden or indistinct. It describes, like an X-ray, the underlying structures, which emerge from the darkness as graphite forms. It is an excavation of sorts; a blind seeingby-feeling as I reach to find transgenerational meaning.

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We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against the other creates... Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. Junichiro Tanizaki1 In the understated paintings and objects that make up this body of work, I contemplate the complexity of shadows – formally, psychologically and conceptually – by capturing nebulous interior scenes from my home, using geometric forms and planes of softened colour. Heidegger asks, ‘Why do we find something like time at the position that the shadow occupies...?’ To answer this, I draw on the methods of three historical painters: the psychological aspect of de Chirico’s barren compositions meets the colourful chaos of Bonnard, all of it tempered by Morandi’s stillness.

The shadows in these painted rooms have been privileged over the objects casting them because they are transient, and move within the space, mediating its substance with the temporality of the changing light. In their cyclical impermanence, the shadows speak of the passage of time in a way that the objects cannot. Additionally, in the flatness of their projection onto surfaces, they mimic the abstraction inherent in painting itself. My paintings, like Bonnard’s and Morandi’s, focus on an honest engagement with the material’s physical and optical properties: the canvas, paint, painting medium and brushes all have their say, and participate in the potential modes of application. In addition to the canvases, a few unadulterated objects stand around: a broom and a slightly battered chair with a head-like piece of hewn marble resting on the seat. These seem out of place, but their colours resonate with those in the paintings and they silently signal domesticity and labour. The autobiographical nature of the work is directly formalised in the leaning

paintings, Triptych and Diptych I and II. The canvases are the proportion of my body and, while representing shadows, cast their own in overlapping colours and shapes, extending the subject of the work into the environment they occupy. In meditating on my own shadows, and materialising them through contemplation, observation and careful craft, I hope to have these shadows hold not just the specific time span in which the work was created, but time as we experience it, and which relates to the movement and being of any person.

Triptych, 2019 Oil on canvas 170 x 55 cm (each)

Shadows III, 2019 Oil on canvas 101 x 76 cm

Love tied the knot of time, 2019 Oil on canvas 50 x 37 cm

Shadows II, 2019 Oil on canvas 101 x 76 cm

Diptych I, 2019 Oil on canvas 170 x 55 cm (each) References 1 In Praise of Shadows

CAPTIONS

Bonnard was among the first wave of painters to use a camera. In creating my paintings, I likewise begin with photographs, taken on my iPhone. This device can be used to translate directly from the world, capturing brief points of view of the space I move through, which then form the basis of compositions constructed to evoke a sense of the histories that have unfolded there. As with de Chirico, I zoom and crop to

create disorienting compositions while retaining something aesthetically rich. I am endeavouring to conjure moods that range from the uncomfortable and disorientating to sadness, loss, light and healing.

LORAINE BOYLE

The Shadow Is Many Footsteps Long

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The Memory of Ghosts

203 OLIVER HAMBSCH

We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. Baudrillard1

and as evidence that recounted events actually happened, as well as memento mori – a way for us to reflect on our brief role within a much larger narrative that is still developing.

image – plays an important role in my images. The whole procedure, from image creation through to final printing, becomes a symbol for the transmission and decay of collective memory.

My work stems from a desire to explore my family’s collective memory, and construct an understanding of my own cultural and familial identity. Due to the devastation of the Second World War, most of my German family heritage was lost. Death, loss and voluntary amnesia have left holes in my family narrative. The Second World War therefore represents a form of curtain behind which my family history can only be glimpsed, through surviving anecdotes and photographic relics which have mostly been either completely or partially decontextualised. Their age, relevance and the emotional weight of their subjects can only be guessed at. The tragedy of never being able to recover the full picture of my family history has always haunted me.

In my work I’ve aimed to visualise the gradual narrative decay of memory, and the means of trying to retrieve what has already been lost. Photocopies, as a symbol of perfect and nearinfinite reproduction of an image, form a substantial part of my methods. However, no copy is a true reproduction of the original image, nor are the copies identical to each other. The mechanical copy process always introduces flaws, similarly to how each retelling of a story changes it slightly. By photocopying the photograph consecutively up to twelve times – each time a copy of a copy – these flaws and changes are emphasised and enlarged. Each copy becomes more abstracted, losing as well as gaining information, until all I’m left with is an echo of the original.

The final images on exhibition are fragments of a shattered family narrative, each one a ghost from the past that haunts my present.

An element of randomness is also introduced by moving, enlarging or cropping the original image on the copier window during the copy process. Printer toner – a substance created purely for the exact replication of an

Wir sind was wir waren (We are what we were), 2019 Lithograph on paper 100 x 70 cm Edition of 20

Die Ruinen der Toten (The ruins of the dead), 2019 Lithograph on paper 100 x 70 cm Edition of 20

Die Wunden unserer Väter (The wounds of our fathers), 2019 Serigraph on paper 64 x 45 cm Edition of 20

Zum Frühstück auf nach Paris (Off to Paris for breakfast), 2019 Serigraph with toner powder on paper 64 x 45 cm Variable edition

Fragment 6, 2019 Lithograph on paper 64 x 45 cm Edition of 20 References Simulacra and Simulation, 1994

CAPTIONS

The images I use as subject matter are all photographs that I recovered from my family archive. Much like stills captured from a film reel, these photographs are fragments taken from a decaying chronicle. The photographic image acts as a reservoir for our collective memory,

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Un/Natural: The Curated Landscape of Table Mountain

While the mountain superficially holds the promise of nature, it is difficult to find any part of it where human presence has not left visible marks. Some are obvious, like tourist facilities, quarries, roads, plantations and extensive water infrastructure. Others less so, especially to the untrained eye, such as changes in indigenous vegetation distribution, naturalised alien species, displaced watercourses, ponds and a multitude of other subtle marks of human presence.

My practice employs slow photography, as described by David Campany, which involves the use of timeconsuming, analogue methods to force the photographer to contemplate, to be still, to compose and observe. The photograph often captures what remains after the decisive moment has passed – in this instance, the aftermath of human intervention in nature. Slow photography also requires slow viewing: exploring the landscape, concentrating

on the detail, and uncovering subtle clues in order to discover that all is not as it seems at first glance. This project hopes to prompt the viewer to question their understanding of what nature is, their place in it, and to look critically at the way our collective and individual actions and attitudes manifest in the world around us. It is in this context that this project considers Table Mountain and its surrounds as a visible record of centuries of human imposition on the landscape.

Signal Hill in mist, 2019 Silver gelatin hand print 17.8 x 15.2 cm

Paradise, 2019 Inkjet print on paper & video projection 140 x 175 cm, 10 Minutes

UCT dam, Groote Schuur Estate, 2019 Silver gelatin hand prints 30.5 x 40.6 cm (each)

Two oaks and pine, Newlands Forest, 2019 Inkjet print on archival paper 55 x 122 cm

Rhodes Memorial from Rhodes High School, 2019 Inkjet print on archival paper 45 x 60 cm

CAPTIONS

It has been proclaimed one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature, and is visited by more than a million people annually (counting only those using the aerial cableway). It is considered a magnificent backdrop to the city of Cape Town. Among Capetonians like myself, ‘our mountain’ is seen as a place of conservation, recreation and natural splendour. It is an accessible way to escape from the city, whether walking the dogs in the forest, running the more remote trails, or climbing one of the crags. This body of work explores the Table Mountain National Park and its adjoining parks and greenbelts.

Though the mountain purports to represent nature, one could argue that equally it represents culture. I consider it a living curated landscape, where centuries of human presence and intervention have moulded the land in ways that have left large tracts resembling European woodland, complete with oaks, poplars, plane trees, the tall fescue grass below them covered in snowdrops and narcissus. In certain areas it seems more a simulacra of the Lake District or the New Forest than what one might expect to find on a mountain in Africa. In other areas, the mountain is scarred with dams, quarries and aqueducts. All of this human intervention, much of it with the colonial intent of ‘civilising’ nature or creating a sense of landscapes left behind in Europe, has left the mountain fundamentally changed from its pre-colonial state.

EUGENE VAN DER MERWE

Table Mountain occupies a unique position and status among South African landscapes, owing to its extensive representation in indigenous histories and myths, colonial historical records, maps, art and documents (see Nick Vergunst’s Hoerikwaggo, 2001).

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We dedicate this catalogue to the 2019 Technical Meyer, Melvin Pather, Sitaara Stodel and mentors, compatriots, teachers and friends. Your Committee of 2019 would like to thank: Our four years in the writing. Four years of labour, grown. Thank you. We remember those who are present. Our lecturers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; For your guidance and for assisting with Catalogue announcements, the Catalogue and Grad Show. Those who have Campbell, Russell Jones, Khanyisile Mbongwa, much appreciated. Our peers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; For the many Friday, Bake Sale, Thrift Sale and Silent Auction, this would not have been possible. In particular, Abbey, Ashleigh, Casandra (especially for the Kyle, Laura, Luke, Oliver, Philip, Rosa, Shakil Grad Show: thank you and good luck! Additional Studio for hosting the Silent Auction; to the To those behind the scenes at our institution, the Michaelis Galleries. Particular thanks to

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Staff: Stanley Amon, Moeneeb Dalwai, Julian Ga Charles van Rooyen. Throughout this degree you knowledge, skills and dedication will be remembered families, given and chosen – This is the closure of a love and sacrifice. It is from walking it with you that we not here to witness this, and value those who have m formation of our work throughout the years. In particu and Stephen Inggs and Fritha Langerman for their a contributed to the making of this catalogue – Matthew Matthew Slater and Lena Sulik. Your patience and who were involved in fundraising throughout the y in both planning and execution. Without your selfl the respective committees of these initiatives and t supplementary photography), Cayley, Chloë, Emm and Ulriche. Special mention to the Third Years wh thanks – To the Waiting Room for hosting Early Frid patrons of both those events, especially the contr the support and admin staff. To the University of C Scan Shop for their generosity and guidance.

Staff: Stanley Amon, Moeneeb Dalwai, Julian Gasson, Duncan Charles van Rooyen. Throughout this degree you have served as knowledge, skills and dedication will be remembered. The Catalogue families, given and chosen – This is the closure of a chapter at least love and sacrifice. It is from walking it with you that we have learnt and not here to witness this, and value those who have made themselves formation of our work throughout the years. In particular, Jonah Sack and Stephen Inggs and Fritha Langerman for their advice with both contributed to the making of this catalogue – Matthew Bradley, Kurt Matthew Slater and Lena Sulik. Your patience and enthusiasm is who were involved in fundraising throughout the years with Early in both planning and execution. Without your selfless hard work, the respective committees of these initiatives and the Grad Show: supplementary photography), Cayley, Chloë, Emma, Julia, Kerry, and Ulriche. Special mention to the Third Years who assisted with thanks – To the Waiting Room for hosting Early Fridays; to SMITH patrons of both those events, especially the contributing artists. the support and admin staff. To the University of Cape Town and Scan Shop for their generosity and guidance.

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PUBLISHED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 2019 GRADUATE EXHIBITION 4 DECEMBER 2019 AT THE MICHAELIS SCHOOL OF FINE ART, CAPE TOWN ISBN: 978-0-620-86200-4 WWW.MICHAELIS.UCT.AC.ZA

GRADUATE CATALOGUE 2019