1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück, 2020
1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück (2020) is a bobbin lace work crafted from World War II parachute silk cord gifted to Pierre Fouché. The medium’s provenance was authenticated by a crumpled piece of newspaper dating from the period, used as the core of a ball of 2m length cords. Lovingly sorted and preserved by generations of women, this thread holds the spotted residue of bright orange length markers, possibly dyed with mercurochrome. With too many to edit out in the thread selection and too few to incorporate in any meaningful way, these blemishes add nuances of stochasticism to the greater purpose of the work: an invitation to contemplate what humanity values enough to preserve.
The figure rendered is a bobbin lace interpretation of an iconic WWII photograph taken in 1944 by Horace Bristol; currently in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. The photograph is not only the subject of historical relevance, but also documented a staggeringly beautiful young man. Its uncanny contemporary feel highlights the absurdity of enlisting young men and sending them off to kill one another under the guise of patriotism. The artwork title is derived from two German words extracted from the found piece of newspaper by the artist. Combined, the words read: “life-long explosive happiness”. – Lindsey Raymond
Scan of a 1940’s newspaper article titled ‘Partei Krise in Amerika’ (Party Crisis in America).
In Sampler[]3x4 - or the Burden of Excess (2020), Pierre Fouché interprets a set of thread geometries discovered by an algorithm written by Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, and lacemaker, Veronika Irvine. This algorithm computes the variety of ways threads can intersect based on the rules of bobbin lace grounds. In Irvine’s article, Developing a Mathematical Model for Bobbin Lace, published in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts in 2014, she posited a mathematical representation of the lace craft with potential applications well beyond textiles, patterns, and adornment.
Fouché’s sample shows 23 of the millions of new grounds already discovered by Irvine’s algorithm, and reflects his effort to translate these into bobbin lace designs; which still require a lacemaker’s interpretation. The grounds in his sampler are all based on a 3x4 tile of possible thread intersections. The possibility of multiple outcomes is the ‘burden of excess’ of this endeavour, as any geometric mesh possible to be made in lace can have hundreds of variations based on what stitches and combinations of stitches are used, and the way the thread’s movements are interpreted with the inclusion or not of support pins at each intersection.
– Lindsey Raymond
Studio process: Stitch and tension sampler and cord sorting
Sampler[ ]3x4 - or the Burden of Excess, 2020. 170/2 Egyptian cotton bobbin lace, mounted as an insertion on a polycotton lace pillow cloth, worn and faded from years of lacemaking. Unframed: 75 x 51 cm. Lace: 2.5 x 55 cm.
The Judgment of Paris (after Wtewael), 2013
The Judgment of Paris (after Wtewael) III, 2018
Your Young Voice - A Portrait of Ivan Katzen, 2012
There can be few 21 st century arts more gendered than lace – in Lace, not Lace at the Hunterdon Museum of Art in the USA in 2018, just one man joined 27 women to exhibit the contemporary artistic potential in traditional bobbin and needle techniques. However, the South African Pierre Fouché is busy levelling the playing field for his female colleagues. If ever a medium were the victim of sexual politics, it is the technique of lacemaking. Mid-20 th century feminist artists challenged the prevalent attitude that only male art was to be taken seriously. They used textiles techniques that are commonly identified as craft and potentially dismissed as ‘women’s work’. Lace, not Lace, curated by Devon Thein in Clinton, New Jersey, strove to present lace as a contemporary fiber art derived from traditional bobbin and needle skills, to overturn the ubiquitous image of lace as doilies, tablecloths and seductive underwear. In it she acknowledged the pioneering work of lace artists from the 70s and 80s onwards, many still working today, which opened up possibilities on which Fouché’s generation is expanding. Some modern artists plunder lace to create their unique voice but take only basic techniques swiftly executed, but Fouché has immersed himself in it and in less than a dozen years is exulting in a level of proficiency, often spread at large scale, that many take a lifetime to reach. Bobbin lace at any scale is time-consuming and expensive, and makers often experiment in their own time on an autotelic basis. As the philosopher Matthew Crawford has explained: ‘Autotelic activities … are guided by intimations of something valuable that you are trying to bring more fully into view by your activity. In the course of your repeated efforts, you find that what you are aiming at is a moving target, because it reveals itself only in the course of your pursuit.’i Fouché has done this while making his living. His 350 cm x 780 cm hanging The Seas and All will Part, Expire, 2017 – 19, was executed under an 18-month Spier Artist Patronage Programme bursary and is now
in the collection of their Arts Trust near Stellenbosch, which has one of the largest collections of South African art. Intriguingly, some of Fouché’s youthful activism took strategies from Feminism. As a queer artist (using the term queer rather than gay to draw in all the nuances in LGBTQ+ culture), Fouché explored how feminists set out to neutralise society’s dualism with radical rather than reactionary activism. Reactionary activism explores merger strategies to nurture recognition and overturn attitudes, whereas the radical route creates independent sources of identity. Fouché’s optimistic radicalism is giving contemporary lace exposure in the art world, removing its craft label and establishing it as art. He admits that lace’s highly gendered tradition was originally its main appeal for him. In contrast to the majority of his female colleagues, who have turned their fascination with the technique into personal artistic expression, his path through Fine Art led him first to sculpture, experimentation taking him through paper cutting, painted puzzles and labels, and into portraits created with the spots on coloured dice (still a big seller) before engaging with some of the textiles with which he had been surrounded as a child. ‘Needlepoint led to crochet, crochet led to bobbin lace and I fell hook, line and sinker in love. The technique suits my personality and sensibility perfectly. I love puzzles, patterns, the mechanics of structures. Lace is a sculptural process of constructing malleable objects that appear like delicate lines on paper, yet remain subjected to the laws of physics like any objects in space’, he says. ii But his understanding of the design strategies needed for lace was facilitated by a long apprenticeship in evaluating tone and line, using photographic realism but deconstructing it in painstaking detail. His studies iii describe months, if not years, of careful planning for early projects, drawing up stitch diagrams. The jump from that into lace diagrams is but a small one. Contemporary lace pioneers had to reinvent design skills which had been abandoned by the generation before them,
but for Fouché, impetus was provided by his education:
proclaiming the title does not automatically make you one.
‘I think I had a fast track journey with lace through a combination of desire, aptitude and an addictive personality. Having had a fine arts education certainly helped too, since the rigours of the course leaves one with a cando attitude to almost any challenge.
‘From a personal-political point of view, my making lace meant that I identified with women, women’s work, and feminine approaches to creativity which immediately placed my bobbin lace artworks outside the patriarchy. It helps not to have to spell that out every time I exhibit.’ vi
‘I regret not having gone through the “proper” route of working through lace skills systematically since there are many gaps in my knowledge still. Luckily there are also many ways to solve the same lace problems and a bit of common sense goes a long way. Instead, I jumped head-first into designing with one or two technique samplers to get the hang of the technical challenges.’iv A focus of Fouché’s work is his use of queer iconography. He has always been keen to avoid ghettoising his artwork, and his lifestyle, working through a vision that would eventually lead to his work, as an artist with non-normative sexuality, ‘being read without the adage ‘gay’ being used – a possibility that can only occur when our current classification’s distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality fails to signify.’ (my emphasis) v But how might we identify this? Queer imagery may for example start with a portrait with which society is familiar, perhaps brothers-in-arms at a family celebration, and subtly twist the key – perhaps more intimate in posture, perhaps half-naked, perhaps just the seriousness with which two men address the lens as they put down a marker in their relationship. Being attracted to lace as ‘women’s work’ is one thing, and rendering his delicately decorative but muscular male images in a perfectly executed lace technique is quite another. The fellow-lacemaker gasps at the perfection of his method as much as his results. ‘I decided that the only way that I can engage with bobbin lace as a male artist, is with sensitivity to the existing structures of what is a very supportive environment for women, and utmost respect to the technique. That meant I had to become a real lacemaker, and unlike being an artist,
In some ways, both the men and the women who focus on lacemaking are refugees from the politics of masculinity. In entering the lace world, where techniques are passed on in small groups and classes within a world-wide framework that washes technical expertise to the outermost corners through books, travelling tutors, social media, the occasional online tutorial, but mainly sheer experience and experiment, Fouché has found unquestioning acceptance of what he is: a born lacemaker. Feminine lacemakers can also be marginalised within the female world for their engagement with painstaking detail, but the lace aficionado is drawn in to a deeply absorbing activity that provides powerful meditative support. Lauran Sundin from the USA, who makes lace jewellery in gold and silver, tells clients disinterested in her technique that she uses it as a meditation, with which they connect. After first consulting books, Fouché started attending weekly meetings with the Cape Lace Guild at the home of Charlotte Keen, which he continues to do. ‘The informal way skills get transferred through craft circles is much more effective than learning from books. Intergenerational interaction is spiritually very nourishing, too. I now consider Charlotte and the ladies from the Friday group my mentors and dear friends.’ vii Historically, lace is regionally-based, the litany of locations denoting discreet groupings of techniques, perhaps tapebased around Milan or individually perfected then worked-together part-laces in the Low Countries, and the lace student usually works up through a hierarchy of complexity. Fouché cherry-picked what he needed, shepherded by Keen with advice here, a book there, as he built up his confidence and
then added in macramé over the course of four solo shows with Whatiftheworld Gallery in Cape Town. Lace may be a diaphanous construction which at first appears frivolous, but the viewer should always look through Fouché’s work to the dense meaning with which he packs his pieces, and never take the surface for granted. Activism means spiritual engagement, and working on Brett Posing for an Imaginary Portrait of Raymond Buys, 2015, took its toll. The rich traditional foliar setting for his portrait of a bush ranger veils the distressing scandal around the degradation and murder of an Afrikaans teenager, and the piece taught Fouché that he needed to take a break from overt political work for the sake of his own well-being. Focussing back to painting (his repertoire extending on through oil, watercolour, graphite, mosaic and embroidery) he looked within for inspiration while his unconscious dealt with the turmoil the work had engendered - swirling abstract brushsweeps with the heady aroma of heated beeswax encaustic, which spreads a buttery mixture of wax, paint and resin, gradually turned into abstracted lace landscapes in the complicated Binche technique that is for many traditional lacemakers the apogee of aspiration. But where they use the finest of threads, he uses acrylic cord, maybe in a gallery scented with personally-concocted perfume evoking the veld. Attention to the material hierarchy in craft work was drawn by the knitter Freddie Robbins at the 2020 Crafts Council exhibition ‘Makers Eye’ in London. ‘There are more hard objects in the Crafts Council Collection, and they are more respected than soft materials. It’s partly because textiles have historically been seen as a female discipline, so are perceived as less serious – they are finickety, they move and they’re unpredictable. Perhaps they seem more vulnerable because objects that don’t sit flat against the wall or hold their form are difficult to show.’ viii
Left: Brett Posing for Imaginary Portrait of Raymond Buys, 2015
Fouché acknowledges: ‘I have no delusions about the privileges my gender has afforded me’ and keenly follows the critical, institutional and increasingly commercial success of contemporary female lace artists. Figurative pieces have continued to appear alongside the more abstract ones. For Lace not Lace, Fouché submitted one of his series of three Judgement of Paris hangings, in which male portraits mix bobbin lace and macramé. This invites the viewer to analyse their pose in the same light as earlier pieces, semi-naked, perhaps masked, possibly ritualistic, active, perhaps caught in the act of disrobing. But the truth is that these images originate from street riots (some in Paris) in hot weather, political activists engaging in battle with police, masking their identity. Their poses were chosen from online news feeds, his triptych ‘depicting the goddesses of the myth as contemporary male protestors’. ix (The Three Graces made the clothes for the goddess Aphrodite, Paris’s choice.) ‘The series is inspired by the precedents of the myth’s depiction in the academic tradition: the subject conveniently allowed the representation of three female nudes. The source images for the panels were … each selected for the classical references of their pose (and a personal affinity to the occupymovement in two of the three panels). ‘On a broader level the work engages the politics of nudity and display: our positive (and negative) reactions to exhibitionism; our participation in it as consumers of visual culture and the mixed messages we are fed about the human body and its display. The work is about the iconography of sexual deviancy and the few but significant areas of human interaction where male nudity is “permissible”.’ x He has extended his experience internationally with bursaries in Paris (before he discovered lace) and Basel, as well as teaching in the UK and the USA; these brought him face-to-face with tiny pieces of lace inspiration which fired him further. ‘My current obsession is an odd little 17 th century Binche edging I saw at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York which I am studying carefully by drafting its thread diagram. I am intrigued by its density and its seemingly random cloth stitch technique. There is no ground to speak of, only a few twists here and there separating the dense curvilinear flower and scroll motifs. This is a marked change to my modus operandi regarding techniques. xi ‘I think it is because I am so enamoured by Binche that I really want to understand it beyond core principles and general aesthetic. With this exercise, I am not just learning how the lace was made, I am also learning about the lacemaker who made it. While some of her (his?) decisions are very counter-intuitive to a modern mind, others shock me with their humanity and uncanny continuity in the sense that I would have done exactly the same thing to solve similar problems at those points in the work.’ In many ways, Fouché has already achieved the goal he set himself in his youth, to reach a stage where his sexuality, and now his gender, fail to signify. Through the aid of his mentors ancient and modern, he has discovered that lace can express any concept with which the maker cares to invest it, a compliment he generously returns by teaching internationally. By exhibiting in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Basel, Clinton, Kalamazoo, Baltimore, Boston, New York and in the UK, Fouché is demonstrating to the world that art lace is now a force with which to reckon, his professional background and gallery representation ensuring that everything he makes, he sells. Such prestige can only benefit everyone involved in the medium. i Crawford M, The World Beyond Your Head, 2015, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York ii In conversation for ‘Making Lace Count’, Jane Atkinson, IOLI Bulletin 2016 iii www.pierrefouche.net, ‘The Distance Between Us, strategizing a queer, artistic, personal and social politic’, Pierre Fouché, MA Fine Arts, University of Stellenbosch, 2006 iv In conversation with the author for this essay v As 3 vi As 4 vii ibid viii ‘Object Lesson’, Alison Britton, Crafts Magazine April 2020 ix ‘Lace not Lace’, Devon Thein, 2018, produced to accompany exhibition at Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, New Jersey 2018-2019 x Ibid, Pierre Fouché xi As 4 Right:
Iemand Anders II, 2016
06.642 or Temporal Consciousness Access is Pierre Fouché’s bobbin lace reconstruction of a 17th century proto-Binche length of lace. The number in the title refers to the artifact’s accession number. The Dutch piece was viewed by the artist at the Ratti Textile Centre in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 2019. Fouche was struck by the uniqueness of the piece; an early lace design referred to as “Opaque Lace” for its dense cloth areas and lack of open net stitches. This style would later evolve into Binche lace, known for its erratic thread movements and distinctive six-pair “snowflake” motifs. Fouché reconstructed the pattern by tracing the threads from a high-resolution photograph he took of the piece. The hand-spun linen of the original was uneven and worn, and the thread movements nearly impossible to discern in places, taking the artist four months to resolve and trace the pattern.
Dutch piece, ca. 1700. Bobbin lace. 61.0 x 3.2 cm. Collection of Ratti Textile Centre, Metropolitan Museum, New York. Viewed by the artist in 2019.
In order to understand the design’s interpretation, Fouché had to enter the mind of an early Baroque lacemaker. While most of the original lacemaker’s technical problem-solving decisions were uncannily familiar to the artist (representing an unbroken lineage of the technique’s development from then to today) others were completely counterintuitive to what a contemporary lacemaker would do; prompting Fouche to wonder if this rationale signified a Baroque world-view, an idiosyncratic personality, or some form of knowledge, now obsolete or lost to history. – Lindsey Raymond
06.642 or Temporal Consciousness Access, 2020
The Little Binche Peacock and Other Utopian Dreams (Installation view), 2019
The Seas and All will Part, Expire, 2017-19
At the epicentre of Pierre Fouché’s installation The Little Binche Peacock and Other Utopian Dreams (2019), a vision lies before us, in both senses of being made palpable, and manifesting as a lie, fabricated, indeed an affront. Entitled The Lord Himself among Us (2017 – ongoing), he is bedecked in the demigod musculature formerly known as Antiquity, a classic hunk trading in the sets and repetitions of masc4masculinty. But as the designation alludes, we (us, the viewers), can think of him as Adam, a word ‘himself’ made flesh from and for earthly progeny. Eden is the template of species bliss, and, unfalteringly, cisgenderist heterosexism, with parts and roles accorded their eternal functions (i.e. fictions). A recap: a rib, a romp, aplomb; the tree, the fruit, the serpent whispered the root; a bite, afoot, the Fall; ah! bewildered, damned, ashamed of it all. Awareness and expulsion are twined, yet another appraisal supersedes this. Sylvia Wynter in ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument’ highlights the 15th century treatise Oration on the Dignity of Man by Pico della Mirandola as the seminal text departing from theocracy to inscribe the original autonomy of man, in which he rearticulates that “the highest Father…took up man...placing him at the midpoint of the world”, proclaiming: We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself. . . . Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable art the moulder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine. i
As “maker of thyself”, “confined by no bounds” to “fix limits of nature for thyself”, and who can “possess…thine own… desire”, Adam’s wilfulness is ordained by the Renaissance humanist not as failure, but as the shrewd premise of sovereignty, in effect liming and occupying anew the category of the human. From within this cradle modernity rises, suckled upon the concoction of race and waves of colonial ‘civilising’ missions, weaned from lowliness into the desired intransigence Wynter deems an “overrepresentation” of man as solely Eurocentric, which she implores must be subject to “unsettling”. ii The hermetic has fronted as the universal through normalising dehumanisation in inhumane conquest, relegating those beings outside its categorical postulates to discontinuities and futurelessness as property. “[C]olonial encounters show us Man as an eruption”, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discerns in ‘Earth Stalked by Man’, a violence of disproportionate self-replication inextricable from detonating the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which the ubiquity of human touch spawns ecological calamities. iii The Anthropocene operates within at least two registers, one of a “planetary scale”, another “always parochial, perspectival and performative”, as Tsing continues iv, and therefore vulnerability to, and culpability for, crises is differential. Race adjoined to gender, ability, class and sexuality, is carried forth to fortify and discipline access to immunity. Although rendered in silken yarns of burnt umber, yellow ochre, dark leaf green and phthalo blue, The Lord Himself “bears” his hitherto unremarked whiteness, as Davina Cooper paraphrasing Sara Ahmed beholds in Everyday Utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces, as “a kind of train that extends…motility and reach”.v We’re all born naked and the rest is a drag, someone dissents. Yes, and no. Fouché poses a paradoxical being, the textiled nude. His half-nakedness fibred in bobbin lace does not divulge his sex in biological terms, but recalcitrantly unties towards indeterminacy and sensation. Pinned with the titular peacock to a pillow, hung within a turned wood display structure which conjures that charged milieu of divestiture – the changing room – and stationed afore a sheer, tailing, crescent deep, The
Seas and All will Part, Expire (2017 -19), the prelapsarian scenario and its echoes of exposure are revisited. The timeworn flight from paradise installs not only the “out-ofplace…anxiety of misplaced body parts” but more so the “social capacity to feel” as a form of interminable regulation, of the proper norms regarding bodily “proximity, distance, contact, and place”, which Cooper terms “proprioception”.vi To be naked in public is perceived habitually as a lapse in judgement, illegitimate and deviant, and so nudism is internally a vastly regulated activity, in which its proposition of sensorial appearance is desexualised. Sex is relegated to culture, and thus cordoned off from a return to nakedness as nature’s way. Nudism’s supposed authenticity relies on these stratified demarcations of uncontaminated zones, whilst authorising and aligning a certain virile masculinity to, and as, the natural and the healthy, and therefore ennobled and civil. Within this paradigm, queerness is unnatural, affected. Cooper asks whether it would be best to think of nudism as “an everyday utopia of the right” given the historical and ongoing confluences of nudism with practices of eugenics, and suggests we need to engage “public rather than associational or club nudism” for progressive orientation.vii To queer the nude body in nature entails not only the sexualisation of wilderness through the very bodies either branded as the infectious symptom of consumer urbanity, or feminised, animalised1 and demonised as queer, but to also forego custody and ownership of land towards a commons. Here the legacies of the Radical Faeries, rural assemblies of queer bodies founded in the 70s to reinvigorate preindustrial, even pagan, ways of being alongside contemporary eco-sexual politics, can be invoked to think of homophobia and capitalism as toxic. “Queerness is not yet here”, José Esteban Muñoz declares in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “we are not yet queer...but we can feel [queerness] as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”.viii If queerness is a future utopia, which one strives towards for the concrete worlding of currently absented impossibilities, queerness shares affinities to 1 Insult is reconstituted in the gay lexicon for hirsute body types, cum sexual ‘tribes’, of ‘bears’ and ‘otters’, not to mention the imaginative worlds of ‘furries’.
modalities of nudism as a “political project” of the “prefigurative”, rather than the ideal, practicing “utopia in formation”. ix Rearing his head, the peacock nettles “am I not, truly, the lord himself among us?” Away with this anthropocentric business! From the studio notes of Fouché: The word ‘peacock’ and ‘Paean’, ea. hymn, song of joy and triumph, are related. Other cognates of the peacock (pavo in Latin) are ‘Pavor’ (dread which strikes the heart) and, ‘Pave’, as in ‘pave the way’. The cry of the peacock is a mystical call, beckoning the soul to cross the threshold of awakening. Mayura (peacock) in Sanskrit etymology means slayer of snakes, owing to the omnivorous diet of the bird. In Hindu cosmology the god of war, Karttikeya, has a peacock as his vahana, or vehicle, upon which he traverses the universe, as an antidote to latent malevolence, voracity and spleen. If only a peacock fringed the Tree of Knowledge, more than our second skins would be shelved, Fouché infers. This supernatural bent finds footing in the annual moulting of the peacock’s iridescent plumage synchronised to the secession of the monsoon, embodying both the incredulity of resurrection and the circularity of rebirth, less evanescent than the other totem in question, the rainbow, with which he is often paired. Incorruptible2 , his feathers, like no other quills, sanction power and judiciousness – in Hans Memling’s altarpiece The Last Judgement (1473) the archangel Michael’s wings are of peacock plumes as he weighs the souls of the dead. Two theories prevail on the origin of the peacock’s oculi:
2 The symbolic longevity of the peacock finds its place within Catholic doctrine, as is the case, through the flesh. Christine E. Jackson in Peacock, cites St Augustine’s 5 th century musings on a miraculous meal: This property, when I first heard of it, seemed to me incredible but it happened at Carthage that a bird of this kind was cooked and served up to me. I took a suitable slice of flesh from its breast, and when it had been kept as many days as make any other flesh stinking, it was produced and set before me and emitted no offensive smell... For who except God, the Creator of all things, endowed the flesh of the dead peacock with the power of never decaying?” (Jackson, C.E. 2006. Peacock. Reaktion Books: London. pp. 53-54).
as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Argus Panoptes, a hundred-eyed giant assigned by the goddess Hera with the surveillance of her husband Zeus’ mortal lover, Io – whom Zeus transformed into a heifer to shield her from Hera’s fury – is lulled into sleep and beheaded by Hermes to liberate Io, following which Hera plucks Argus’ eyes and deposits them in the starry train of the peacock, her beloved bird3 . The other is detailed in Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which his earlier postulates about natural selection are complicated by the conspicuous peacock, whose fanning tail evolves to seduce, rather than to survive, his environment. Within the social Darwinism of Victorian society, sexual selection would be extended to grasp sexuality as innate, rather than as a sequence of sporadic, variable acts, and so, retroactively, another species is hailed by medicine and psychiatry – the homosexual – pathologised for halting the proliferation of his race. A peacock train in pride is a potent signifier of straight pageantry adopted by the dandy, yet queerer still is that of the train not put to use, as wilting, repudiating ornament, a certain uselessness feted by artists of the Aesthetic, Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements as metonymic not only of conceit, but of escaping the impositions of pure instinct and posterity, and wayward thus, a personification of art, and the artist himself4 . In Jean Delville’s Plato’s School (1898), a trio of peacocks with albinism are perched above and behind the philosopher and his unclothed and coupled devotees, pointing to the twilight immateriality and homoerotic splendour of knowledge transfer, and in another scene of androgyny, Aubrey Beardsley’s The Dream (1896), a “Youth more glitt’ring than a Birth-Night Beau” visits Belinda, the protagonist of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1717), in her “Morning Dream” to forewarn her to “beware of Man!” A lace bed-curtain with peacock and bust motif shrouds and
3 Hera rides above the clouds in a chariot drawn by peacocks, finding a modern expression in the Pavo constellation of the southern skies. 4 In Francis Alÿs’ The Ambassador (2001), the artist revives and parodies this version of the aesthete, alongside the sycophantic revelries of mega exhibitions, by representing himself through the surrogate of an actual peacock roaming the promenades of Venice for the Biennial.
exteriorises Belinda. Fouché in pairing the peacock with man cradling the breast of the bird, both peering beyond the frame, offers a microcosm of non-reproductive touch, through a meta-exhibitionist play on the figures of artist and muse. But enough anthropomorphising! The peacock is not only a mythical presence, an astral projection, a moralising fable, a gender enactment, a moribund mirror, but an entity to live with, a sentience of soil and air. The peacock is radically unplumbed, there where – there when – our tongues are insolvent. Peacocks are cultural beings, but not of our positioning; peacocks have their own cultures, modes of socialisation and speech. Stacy Alaimo accentuates in ‘Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals’ that approximating an understanding of nonhuman animals embraces criticism of the “ideology of nature as resource, blank slate for cultural inscription, or brute, mechanistic force”. x Mutually implicated, Fouché literally entangles his figures through lace, knotting across kind. “Companion species infect each other all the time,” Donna Haraway writes in Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, tracing the phrase to the Latin cum panis, “at table together”, an intimacy where “[b]odily ethical and political obligations” should become virulent. xi Haraway links her prior formulation of companion species to her prompt of “making kin”, as “wild” “oddkin” as opposed to “godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family” which “troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible”. xii Here the etymology of queer should be implored, as Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen does in ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’ through quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “‘queer’ itself means across — it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart”, upon which the authors stress that “say[ing] that queer transverses the human is to understand their relation as contingent rather than stable”. xiii Many present configurations of queerness can slip from the recognition the status of the human affords, becoming
Right:
The Lord Himself Among Us, 2017-Ongoing
undone, and so we should cast our webs of relation wider into the shadows of the human, to the queer slippages of nature 5 .
Here the ur-icons of reincarnation and procreation are superseded by craft and rest, a marvellous courtship 8 .
As in his past pieces Aiden’s Metamorphosis (2010) and His foam-white arms go over and around me (2012), Fouché reveals lace in a state of deliberate incompletion. Unlike in those works, The Lord Himself is frontally flattened, foregrounded and affixed. The lacework fragments the body, as the gaze of the lover does, recalled as relic. Strung upon a schematic drawing like a pelt, the threads contrast to the wispy pastel pigments of the peacock nape below, rendered in the same shades 6 as the sensuous ‘happy trail’, between navel and redacted parts. A dense band of pins, effervescent, voodoo sutures these fields across the crown and bill of the peacock, the anterior elbow and diaphragm of man, zones of inhalation and fluttering. Implanted there, the two figures fuse – “not an incorporation, but a grafting” – as David Bell explicates in ‘Queernaturecultures’ with regards to Haraway’s “entwined” term ‘naturecultures’, any semblance of severance a mirage, as nature itself is a notion discursively produced (“nature is cultural”), although not in the overly determined, deleterious manner in which all existence is only culture, since queer ecology also reflects that “culture is natural”. xiv Bobbins trail off from the pins, as both bodies open to circuities beyond themselves. Lower halves are subjected to occlusion and substitution, which are simultaneously an unravelling and suspense. Earthly contact eviscerates mortality, the body floats in air as in water. The definitive constituents of majestieuse voëls 7 – the train and phallus – transmute and swell in the tentacular muster of bobbins, themselves tied up, flayed and held.
In presenting the work as a demonstration of technique, Fouché not only unveils the free-form processes of binche, but in the idiom of the working station, the aptitudes of stoppages and elongation. The refusal to conclude the work, which transfers that labour upon the viewer, is also the promise of return. A return in which man cannot be the same. Rather than position lace as an obsolete quirk or anachronistic fixture, Fouché carries lace forth as a sustained disposition, becoming reparative. Here ecologies of production centre the imminence of touch, which is furthermore a question of scale. The ultimate impulse of the The Little Binche Peacock and Other Utopian Dreams is to exalt the diminutive. This is the inverse of the disaffected repetitions of the quality Tsing dubs as “scalability” in ‘On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales’, which is an ostensibly seamless mode of expanse turned capture, “without rethinking basic elements”. xv For Tsing, scalability finds its dreadful apotheosis in the model of the plantation, which proliferates yet is “constantly abandoned, leaving ruins”. xvi To counter colonial, anaesthetised economies of scale – which homogenise discontinuity – requires “unexpected conjuncture[s]” and the “new agendas” of “diversity-inthe-making” xvii , of “nonscalability”, prone to the “fuzzy translations” and abrasions of “the architecture of nonnesting”. xviii These are the enduring, arduous strains and interruptions with which Fouché strips and displaces lace from its expatriate domesticity.
5 Alaimo enlists Bruce Bagemihl’s canonical text Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity where he writes of the “kaleidoscopic”, “multiple”, “fluid and transmutable” genders and sexualities present in the animal world, establishing clear resonances with the “one we inhabit”, and depleting the descriptor ‘unnatural’ of many of its unfounded connotations (2010: 51). 6 Both peacock feathers and human hair shimmer from the cellular structure of keratin. 7 Afrikaans for ‘majestic birds’, with puns on avian size and grace directed to male anatomy.
Left:
Pattern for The Lord Himself Among Us, 2017
Enter The Seas and All will Part, Expire. A corded rope binche evocation of the ocean, like the drone of the seashell, stowing that which transcends itself immeasurably. Its
8 Afrikaans poet Loftus Marais, in ‘Liefkoos’ (noun – sweetheart, verb – caress), from Jan, Piet, Koos en Jakob (2019), brings his lover offerings of “ouderwetse woorde” (bygone words), such as “vlerksleep” which literally translates to “wing drag”, but means wooing: “…en die kristal van ‘vlerksleep’ vryf jy tussen/ vingertoppe, sê dit gee ‘n statiese, elektriese/ soort lading af, ek lag, ek lig die skulpding/ ‘skattebol’ – so klein – op na jou oog,/ jy inspekteer patrone wat die buitekant bespat/ en vra my, is daar dalk iets binne-in?”
vertical, curved slant decidedly nautical, with auxiliary notes of the diorama and theatre curtain, devices that arrest and interlude time. “[I]s the sea not/ the peacock of peacocks?” Friedrich Nietzsche asks in his poem ‘Werke in Zwei Bäden, I’, where peacocks – in a parable on the suspect escapism of mere poets – “learned their vanity from the sea”, juxtaposed to the buffalo, who, “near to the/ sand, closer still to the thicket, nearest, however, to/ the swamp”, is “disdain[ful]” of “beauty, sea and peacock-splendour”. xix At one level, the quagmire and the ocean manifest as divergent clarities and volumes, inspiring opposing literary credence; on another, they, like the peacock, buffalo, the artist, and us, all are primarily composed from, and live as, bodies of water. Thinking about our bodies as watery, and therefore porous, profoundly destabilises the discrete agency of the human. Astrida Neimanis, in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, stipulates how feminism attuned to the environment formulates bodies as functioning in chorus across “different interpermeating registers”, incorporating those from the “biological or chemical to the technological, social, political, and ethical”. xx Foaming fumingly, rapturously, across six panels in an other bigger splash, water is sequenced as network of loops and holes. Water is cyclical, like lace it has a “compulsion to repeat”, which is firstly “facilitative and gestational”, and thus not imitative as “[e] very repetition”, as time and flow, “enacts difference”. xxi Water is still here: “[o]ur planet neither gains nor relinquishes the water it harbours”, simply beholding its “continual reorganization, redistribution, and relocation” over billions of years. xxii Water is the lived phenomenon and vista of our “embodied dispersals’ 9 . xxiii The sea is in all that will part, expire. Yet the sea is not a vacant screen of unbridled longing and fancy. Oceanic waters are conduits for the transmission of coloniality, capitalism, and toxicity. Congested with our ravages, the tides are acidifying, multispecies in peril. The sea
9 Here the human is repository of, and host to, “bacterial life, meteorology,” and “multispecies biochemistries” in the active pooling and leakage of water. (Neimanis 2017: 57).
is history, as Derek Walcott reprises10 , and along the Cape of Storms, water is both traumatic and traumatised in the convergence of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, where undulations of enslavement are still felt. Christina Sharpe draws upon Afropessimism in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, to describe the “atmospheric condition of time and place” as the “weather”, within which “antiblackness is pervasive as climate”. xxiv In this chronic ecosystem, percolated by the wake of slavery, Black being appears in the space of the asterisked human as the insurance for, as that which underwrites, white circulation as the human. Always, Black being seems lodged between cargo and being. Wake: in the line of recoil of (a gun). Wake: the track left on the water’s surface by a ship. Wake: the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the dead person. xxv From the backside, silhouetted, The Seas and All will Part, Expire is also a magic lantern, casting shadows between rope and funereal wall. In this spectral realm of exclusion, the binds murmur, soften and sieve, as if underwater. Fouché presents the sea in, and as, bondage. Asymmetrical, sadomasochism arranges the body as a vessel for “invoking history” through “an idiom of pleasure”, as Elizabeth Freeman elaborates11 in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. xxvi S/M overlays personal sensations with “collective sufferings, and quotidian forms of injustice”, tendering a “fleshly metacommentary on the dual emergence of modernity and its others”, and accordingly the enmeshed “histories of race, labo[u]r, nationhood, and imperialism as well as sexuality”. xxvii Moisture beckons pressure, lubricates and embalms. Rope bondage, as a particular enactment within S/M, pivots around
10 The West Indian author’s influential poem ‘The sea is history’ (1978), opens with the stanza “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?/ Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,/ in that grey vault. The sea. The sea/ has locked them up. The sea is History.” 11 Freeman writes the chapter ‘Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History’ in relation to Isaac Julien’s short film The Attendant (1993).
Above: Preparatory sketches for The Last Time You Let Me Do This to You (Studio View). Right: The Last Time You Let Me Do This to You, 2016
temporalities of inaction and waiting, alongside those of restraint, suspension and release. Asynchronous, these tensions are held by the rope as a “techniqu[e]” of “distantiation”, which yields, stunningly, a “temporal noncoincidence between action and result”, instilling – through a “liberating gap between an effect and the ‘self ’ as its cause” – the eventual discernment of the “body as object”. x x viii Time opens up to disorientations as the break takes on physical, dispersed properties in anticipatory stillness and deferral. By instrumentalising the body – which is to say, the sea and their 12 (dis) contents – theatrically, Fouché rouses S/M to perform a somatic historiography, in which the “linearity of history itself may be called into question, but, crucially, the past does not thereby cease to exist”. xxix The sadist, as onlooker and actor, imparts power as time; and time as violence, rerouting their embossing of the body as pleasurable. By extension, both artist and audience step into this role, the sea swung before us, seized in abeyance. What happens next is in our hands, and concurrently, an affliction already in motion. Time here is doused in itself. Binche lace for Fouché involves a “slow, mindful anarchy”. xxx The Little Binche Peacock and Other Utopian Dreams is a mnemonic apparatus13 , turning backward, inward, not nostalgically, but in a calculated pursuit of insurgent, twisted temporalities. Craft, as so-called women’s work, is gendered time, ritualised as leisurely only through the biological machinations of matrimony and the household as biotope, coordinated to work. Freeman’s term ‘chrononormativity’, unpacks the “violent retemporalization” by which time is enforced to make “ordinary” the organisation of “human bodies towards maximum productivity”. xxxi These rhythms are naturalised, like gender, through iteration, producing a self indissoluble from capitalism. Queer bodies too can adhere to, and assimilate, these routines, as Rahul
12 Here I rescind from attributing the usual female gender pronouns to the ocean, which function as a trope of coloniality, and rather opt for the nonbinary. 13 Anchored in Fouché’s sublime encounter in Basel with a piece of lace in the collection of Ruth Doephner featuring a peacock motif.
Rao laments in ‘Global homocapitalism’, in which capitalism is made “friendly to queers but also rendering queers safe for capitalism”, maintaining “neoliberal illusions of autonomy and choice”. xxxii Our pride is endorsed, and co-opted, insofar as we are industrious, “obviat[ing] the need for redistribution”. xxxiii Fouché thwarts these inculcations through refiguring work beyond the biennial, month-long scheduling of the solo exhibition. The work will never be ready, always left becoming, lagging. Time is not enough14 . Haraway names the Anthropocene, and its correlate the Capitalocene, “scandals of times”. xxxiv The apocalypse is not looming, but annihilates retroactively, elastically 15 unremittent. A final flourish: waters ablaze, the gallery burning, Cape Town incinerates, rushing. Fouché has seeped The Seas and All will Part, Expire in a perfume of his own making. A “fabulous counterfeit”, “defying climate and season” 16 , the scent infuses the non-indigenous Khakibush (Tagetes Minuta) with Cape Snowbush (Kapokbos, or Eriocephalus Africanus), and accords of veld fire (Lapsang Suchong absolute), saturating, camouflaging, and bookending the undivided installation. A passing sensorium, the work infiltrates the viewer molecularly, a border crossing and dissolution sparked by breathing. The olfactory as emissaries of the presence of another, of the underdeveloped faculties of the human nose, of peacocks whom roost in trees, of sweat an “aroma finer than prayer” 17, of the laboratory, of the faggot, from the French fagot, a little bundle of twigs used to kindle the infernos that immolated heretics, now a flaming queen,
14 Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión’s Ave del Paraiso Florecido (1995), an embroidered blanket featuring an imagined bird of paradise with red oculi in his plumage, can be summoned to think about how a generation of queer artists who succumbed to AIDS defied temporality by making. 15 I write this piece at the time of COVID-19, in which neoliberalism has turned so many homes into work spaces, severing and collapsing the personal. 16 To cite Des Esseintes’ “sensual illusions” in Joris Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884), where he is nauseated by the scent of frangipani wafting into his abode, setting off to simulate a myriad of smells cloaking this exterior incursion. 17 Walt Whitman on the pearls of armpits in ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1855).
of waterlessness18 . We are in the realm of the dead, silk tatters ectoplasm. Ashen, the sillage – the trailing wake, or diffused duration of the fragrance – is the work enraged as siren. Fouché’s alchemy is that of dispossession. A man without a cock, a peacock without a train, a sea without water, a fire bereft of heat, and a clock without a face. Gasping, killing times till further notice, decimation cannot be revoked or fumigated for us alone. What might bud once more “[l]ike something almost being said” is ‘[t]heir greenness” too a “kind of grief” 19 bound by being.
18 Whilst making the work between 2017-18, Cape Town, where Fouché is based, faced a historic water crisis in severe drought, nearing Day Zero where the city would run out of municipal water aside from that allotted through collectible daily rations, or purchased commercially. The scarcity illuminated existing fissures in access to basic resources such as running water, which had been a lingering reality in the lives of poor black communities. 19 Johann de Lange prefaces the opening ‘Hiermaals’ (Afrikaans – this time) section in his volume Die algebra van nood (2009) (The algebra of distress) with Philip Larkin’s ‘The Trees’ (1967) reduced to a single stanza, and hence devoid of the anodyne expectancy of “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh”.
i Della Mirandola cited in Wynter, S. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation— An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review. 3(3), pp. 259-260. ii Wynter, ibid: 260. iii Tsing, A.L. 2016. Earth Stalked by Man. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. 34(1), pp.7. iv ibid: 4. v Cooper, D. 2014. Everyday Utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces. Duke UP: Durham. pp. 94. vi ibid. vii ibid: 84. viii Muñoz, J.E. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYUP: New York. pp.1. ix Cooper, D. 2014. Everyday Utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces. Duke UP: Durham. pp. 84. x Alaimo, S. 2010. Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals, in Queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana UP: Bloomington. pp. 60. xi Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP: Durham. pp. 29. xii ibid: 2. xiii Luciano, D. and Chen, M.Y. 2015. Has the Queer Ever Been Human?, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 21 (2-3), pp.189. xiv Bell, D. 2010. Queernaturecultures, in Queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana UP: Bloomington. pp. 143.
xv Tsing, A.L. 2012. On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales. Common Knowledge. 18 (3), pp. 505. xvi ibid: 506. xvii Ibid: 510. xviii ibid: 522. xix Nietzsche, F. 2010. The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, translated by James Luchte. Continuum: London. pp. 24. xx Neimanis, A. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic: Sydney. pp.23. xxi ibid: 97. xxii ibid: 66. xxiii ibid: 57. xxiv Sharpe, C. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP: Durham. pp.106. xxv ibid: 110-111. xxvi Freeman, E. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP: Durham. pp.137. xxvii ibid: 137-138. xxviii ibid: 139. xxix ibid. xxx Fouché, P. 2016. Proposal for The Spier Artist Patronage Program: The Little Binche Peacock and other Utopian Dreams*. pp.3. xxxi Freeman, E. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP: Durham. pp.3. xxxii Rahul, R. 2015. Global homocapitalism. Radical Philosophy. 194, pp. 47-48. xxxiii ibid: 47. xxxiv Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP: Durham. pp.2.
Stephan, 2014
Silk floss, wood, brass pins. 30.5 × 124.5 cm.
James, 2015
Silk floss, wood, brass pins. 14.4 Ă— 32.8 cm. Placeholder Caption
Duncan, 2014 Silk floss, wood, brass pins (Worked by Mignon Groenewald). 41,5 x 12,5 cm.
Pierre Fouché (b. 1977, Pretoria) introduces himself as a lacemaker. This designation highlights his interest in the techniques, materials, histories, and social relevance of textiles. His respect for technique, tradition, and innovation have earned Fouché his place within the craft establishment as an internationally respected practitioner and teacher of contemporary bobbin lace. His penchant for arcane media and aesthetics, has led his practice to include macramé, drawn thread embroidery, encaustic painting, and pinhole photography, as well as traditional painting, drawing and printmaking. Thematically, his work focusses on portraiture and the gaze, photography and representation, appropriation and web-media cultures, as well as some forays into overt queer politics. Often informed by world art history, his desire to understand the machinery of contemporary visual cultures tends toward the Romantic. His consistent marriage of iconography with craftsmanship also contributes to this reading. Fouché achieved his MA in Fine Arts from the University of Stellenbosch in 2006. He has subsequently had several solo exhibitions, most recently, The Little Binche Peacock and Other Utopian Dreams, his 5th solo exhibition with WHATIFTHEWORLD, the installation includes his work as recipient of a Spier Artist Patronage Program bursary received from 2017-19. In 2018 he was the featured artist of the Andorran city of Escaldes- Engordany’s 12th Textile and Glass Symposium. Notable group exhibitions include Lace/not lace at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey; Crafted: Objects in flux at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (2018), Women’s work at the Iziko South African National Gallery (2016), as well as the touring exhibition, Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, first exhibited at the Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York (2015). His work is represented in the public collections of the Iziko South African National Gallery and the Artphilein Foundation, Switzerland.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2019
T he Little Binche Peacock and other Utopian dreams, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town 2017 Vreesaanjaende Verligting, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town 2015 T he Fallen and the Drowned, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town 2014 The Lacemaker’s Studio, DOCK: Basel, Switzerland 2012 These Waves, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town 2012 Fred, Denis & Other Portraits, Solo Presentation at Volta7, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Basel, Switzerland 2008 C onvoluted Involvement, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town Convoluted Involvement, ABSA Gallery, Johannesburg 2006 The Distance Between Us, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town 2005 Excluded & Unsaid, Blank Projects, Cape Town
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 Matereality, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town 2019 Festival of Light, Spier Estate, Stellenbosch 2018 Ebb ‘n’ Flow, Place and Climate, Walford Mill Museum, Wimborne, UK The 12th Textile and Lace Symposium, CAEE (Escaldes-Engordany Art Gallery), Escaldes- Engordany, Andorra Sunday Service, GUS Gallery, Stellenbosch Lace, Not-Lace, Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ, USA 2017 You & I, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town 2016 After the Thrill is Gone, Gwen Frostic School of Art, Michigan Dear Europa..., WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town Women’s Work, IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, Boston Centre for the Arts, Boston 2015 Objects in Flux - Exploring the Boundaries of Craft, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston Monologues, Aardklop Festival, Potchefstroom Queer Threads, Leslie & Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York Foreign Bodies, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town 2014 Brave New World...20 Years of Democracy, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town 2013 Suspicious Minds - Artist’s Exploration of Mind and Matter, Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town 2011 Trading Freedoms, Love, Sex, Desire & the (Post) Colonial, University of London I ngrid Jonker, Rust & Vrede, Durbanville, Cape Town 2010 Swallow My Pride, Blank Projects, Cape Town 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town Ways of Seeing, Ore gallery, Cape Town Inverting the Pyramid, Blank Projects, Cape Town Manet’s too tight to mention, WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town The Menippean Uprising, Blank Projects, Cape Town 2009 The Gift (in collaboration with Liza Grobler), Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town Studio Visit, Association of Visual Arts (AVA), Cape Town Signs/Representation, 14-1 Gallerie, Stuttgart, Germany Obsessie, KKNK Oudshoorn 2008 The Bijou Burns Again, UCA, Cape Town 2007 Portrait/Landscape, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Laurensford, Somerset West Fest, Rust & Vrede, Durbanville, Cape Town ABSA L’atelier regional finalists exhibitions, Art-B: Bellville & ABSA Gallery, Johannesburg Selected Projects 2005-2007, Blank Projects, Cape Town Greenhouse, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Laurensford, Somerset West Love & Misery, BIJOU art studios, Cape Town A Legacy of Men, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg 2006 Take it Like a Man, Blank Projects, Cape Town 2005 P aper Never Lies, VEO, Cape Town ABSA L’atelier regional finalists exhibition, Art-B: Bellville, Cape Town
ARTWORK DETAILS (in order of appearance)
Pattern for The Lord Himself Among Us, 2017. Soft pastel on paper. 98.5 x 68.5 cm. Preparatory sketches for The Last Time You Let Me Do This to You (Studio View).
1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück, 2020. Silk chords from a World War II parachute. 130 x 180 cm. 1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück (Detail), 2020. Silk chords from a World War II parachute. 130 x 180 cm. Sampler[ ]3x4 - or the Burden of Excess. 2020. 170/2 Egyptian cotton bobbin lace, mounted as an insertion on a polycotton lace pillow cloth, worn and faded from years of lacemaking. Unframed: 75 x 51 cm. Lace: 2.5 x 55 cm. The Judgment of Paris (after Wtewael), 2013. Bobbin lace and macramé in polyester braid. 200 x 80 cm.
The Last Time You Let Me Do This to You, 2016. Acrylic rope and binding wire. 78 x 44 x 30 cm. Stephan, 2014. Silk floss, wood, brass pins. 30.5 × 124.5 cm. James, 2015, Silk floss, wood, brass pins. 14,4 × 32,8 cm. Duncan, 2014. Silk floss, wood, brass pins (Worked by Mignon Groenewald). 41,5 x 12,5 cm. James (In Progress), 2015. Silk floss, wood, brass pins. 14,4 × 32,8 cm.
The Judgment of Paris (after Wtewael) (Detail), 2013. Bobbin lace and macramé in polyester braid. 200 x 80 cm. The Judgment of Paris (after Wtewael) III, 2018. Bobbin lace and macramé in polyester braid, wood. 208 x 80 cm. The Judgment of Paris (after Wtewael) III (Detail), 2018. Bobbin lace and macramé in polyester braid, wood. 208 x 80 cm. Your Young Voice - A Portrait of Ivan Katzen, 2012. Domestic sewing machine stitched lace, chiffon, tulle, fabric, acrylic thread in 6 panels. 197,6 x 22 cm each. Brett Posing for an Imaginary Portrait of Raymond Buys, 2015. Macramé and bobbin lace in polyester braid. 280 x 140 cm. Iemand Anders II, 2016. Bobbin lace in 5mm polyester rope. 280 x 74cm. 06.642 or Temporal Consciousness Access. 2020. 6mm Polyester corded rope. 500 x 148 cm. Multiple 1. The Little Binche Peacock and Other Utopian Dreams (Installation view), 2019. WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, Cape Town. Photography: Hayden Phipps. The Seas and All will Part, Expire, 2017-19. Acrylic cord bobbin lace with perfume accords of Tagetes Minuta (Khakibush), Lapsang Suchong, and Cape Snowbush. Diorama panel. 350 x 780 cm. The Lord Himself Among Us, 2017-Ongoing. Silk floss bobbin lace (In progress), binche style wooden lace bobbins, turned Zambian kiaat display case. 192 x 160 x 53 cm.
Published by WHATIFTHEWORLD 16 Buiten Street, Cape Town, South Africa www.whatiftheworld.com
© WHATIFTHEWORLD 2020 © Images and works: Pierre Fouché Photographs: Matthew Bradley & Hayden Phipps Production: Lindsey Raymond Design: Ben Johnson Printed in South Africa