FABRICATION - Gallery 2

Fabrication

A Message Folded Moulded and Stitched

Fabrication: AMessageFolded,MouldedandStitched,brings together eight artists working in various media, borne out of a rich history of craft, but that have now moved to a place of acceptance as contemporary art.

This exhibition focusses on the exciting interplay between an idea and a tactile response of forming that idea with the hands, using a process that is associated with craft, but elevating the making to contemporary art. “She makes things with her hands. It’s as if her synapses were connected directly to her fingers,” as Maria Buszek so aptly articulated in her collection of academic essays Extra/Ordinary: CraftandContemporaryArt . Thoughts transferred to a piece of art.

Each of the exhibiting artists has skills learnt, often from mothers or other women, or through their own needs and practices. Skills that were intended to be utilised to make things to use and mend and keep their hands busy. But instead, they are making things that have been “transformed into autonomous artistic creations and seen as detached from traditional contexts” (Karin E. Peterson “How the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary” – in Buszek’s book referred to above). The idea of the exhibition was to bring these objects together in a place, so that the thread or connection between the art pieces and the original skills is accepted and apparent; an exposé of contemporary art founded on traditional skills.

What is present in each piece is an idea, or train of thoughts. A message that has travelled from the artist’s brain, through their neural passages, their synapses, to the nerves that control their hands and what they do. So that each piece becomes their message, a concept intertwined with the fabrication of the piece. The meaning or message of the piece need not be fixed by the artist; the exhibition viewer encounters the piece – they examine and read the title or the statement, and find relevance, based on their own lived experience.

Each artist weaves their own story through their fabricated pieces of contemporary art.

KATJA ABBOTT

Biography

After studying graphic design and working as a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and editor for many years, I am currently completing a Visual Arts degree through UNISA. In a world where the conflict between nature and technology is ever present, I am concerned with the effect that rapidly diminishing wild spaces has on the well-being of both humans and animals. Using a variety of mediums including clay, textiles and mixed media, I explore this disconnect from wilderness, wildness and our instinctual intuitive nature.

The primary source of inspiration for my work is the imagery that emerges from the dark and silent realm of the dreamtime. My art practice allows for the unpremeditated emergence of forms and imaginary worlds that lie below the surface of everyday reality.

Loorna & Bertha

Around 2 000 years ago Marcus Aurelius said, ‘Whatstandsintheway,becomestheway’.

Having the limitation of a tiny kiln, this year I found myself making animal heads, rather than entire animals. Thinking I could make their bodies from fabric. Most of the heads my hands made were birds.

In many cultures birds are seen as symbols of transcendence with an ability to defy gravity and exist in multiple realms. Spirits with the capacity to break from confining patterns of existence.

My grandmothers used to sew. One made finely tailored suits and the other was always darning or doing cross-stich embroidery. Both of them were talented women forbidden by their husbands to have their own careers. I have named Loorna and Bertha after and in honour of my grandmother and greatgrandmother who sewed and held things together with much more than thread.

Mordica

Momordica enneaphylla, Cameroon, DRC, Gabon, Ceramic, recycled fabric ecoprinted with oak shavings, wire, acrylic paint, 36 x 12 x 6cm, 2022

BalthasarOliverMelch, Balthasaria mannii, (Oliver), Balthasaria schliebenii, (Melch), DRC, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ceramic, recycled fabric eco-printed with oak shavings, wire, acrylic paint, 38 x 12 x 10cm, 2022

FrankiBoswell, Boswellia spp. Frankincense, Ethiopia, Yemen, Ceramic, recycled fabric eco-printed with oak shavings, wire, acrylic paint, 35 x 10 x 6cm, 2022

CATHY ABRAHAM

Cathy Abraham b. 1968 in Cape Town, South Africa where she currently lives and works. She specialised in process-based art at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town (UCT), where she graduated with an MFA (with Distinction) in 2018. Abraham’s creative work brings together seemingly disparate entities through participation and a ritual based practice. She continues to study under the guidance of artists Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky, participating in regular workshops. She works in film, mixed media, installation, painting and sculpture though her choice of media is primarily informed by her subject matter. In 2018, Abraham’s MFA culminated in a solo exhibition titled, A Deeper Kind of Nothing.

Abraham works systematically with repetitive gestures as a way of thinking through the patterns and traumas that mark our daily existence. The highly developed surfaces of her works consider boundaries between reality, fantasy and illusion.

Abraham refers to the repeated brushstrokes in her paintings and drawings as ‘ghosts’. A metaphor for the spectre of trauma and its haunting of memory, these ‘ghosts’ are counted and numbered with reference to the Kabbalah. Abraham’s spiritual and formal practice challenges notions of time and space, collapsing past, present and future.

SpectralTurningHeart , Oil on Italian Cotton, 170 x 108cm (Paper Size), 177 x 114,5 x 3,5cm, 2022, Framed,

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WILLEMIEN DE VILLIERS

Biography

Willemien de Villiers was born in 1957, in Pretoria, South Africa. She studied Fine Art at the University of Pretoria, graduating in 1978. Currently based in Muizenberg, Cape Town, Willemien also writes, paints and works with ceramics.

Artist Statement

Artisrestoration:theideaistorepairthedamagesthatareinflictedinlife,tomakesomethingthat isfragmented – whichiswhatfearandanxietydotoaperson – intosomethingwhole –

Soft and mutable, cloth by its very nature is a tangible signifier of connection, with its interwoven warp and weft. The fabrics the artist chooses are those used in everyday, ordinary domestic settings, sourced from thrift shops, family and friends. Dripping substances like red wine, turmeric and coffee, the artist subverts the onerous task of removing stains – so often left to women. Moving between ritualistic and prosaic, her substrate of choice is a carrier of densely expressive meaning, underscoring the conceptual framework of her practice.

Her medium of choice – cotton thread – is both a physical and figurative means of connecting. Running point to point, through and over and under, it ties together the visible and invisible, denying a one-dimensional understanding of the object and subject.

She most often uses thread whose colour is inspired by the body – pinks and reds, browns and offwhites. Like the stains on her fabrics, these refer to the lived experience of women and, still so common, the traumas enacted on them

PollinatedStigmaofLily

Biography

LAUREL HOLMES

An emerging artist, Laurel Holmes left the corporate environment in 2012 to concentrate on art making and relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town in 2016. Her painting training has been with Karin Daymond and Ricky Burnett.

Although working mainly in painting (oils on canvas) and some wax encaustic and mixed media, printmaking came into the mix through workshops at The Artists’ Press in 2013 and Sharon Sampson studio in 2014/5 and in 2019, two internships at Warren Editions.

In 2021 Holmes completed a postgrad diploma in fine art (Honours) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, working in porcelain paper clay, and is continuing to work with elements of fragility in new works.

She has paintings and print works in private international and local collections as well as in South African corporates.

Artist Statement

Fabrication is very much around the artist’s energy and intention, carried from the body and vested in the object being made. It is an exhibition about material and materiality, about returning to age old tasks like darning or mending, tasks that embody repetition, repetition to make a point….

In the body of work presented here, Holmes works with porcelain paper clay and handmade and bought art papers. Kaolin, a component of porcelain, comes from an area close to where she lives. Using one’s materials is rarely about making objects; its about making emblematic proxies for something else, and about intentional interchange between the material and the hand and the body.

Holmes’s small white rectangles (ghost i, ghost ii) are porcelain fragments that have been through extreme heat – now vitrified, strong, fragile, translucent. They are the thing they depicts – earth, clay, materiality, tenacity. She wrote in her catalogue: “Where is the tipping point – the fragile metaphorical point at which things hold or begin to disintegrate? The small paper clay sheets that are part of my body of work - blank, brittle, individual - remind us of knowledge and a history that is no more.”

At a time in history, porcelain was for the refined, for the powerful, the monied and privileged ruling classes of old Europe. In the long history of material objects, porcelain is distinct even from gold, and a metaphor for unattainable purity.

The porcelain paper clay memory boxes (made during 2021, during Holmes’ postgraduate diploma in fine art studies at Michaelis) resulted in seeking a way to ‘preserve’ what was lost in the Jagger Library fire of 18 April 2021. These porcelain objects are empty – holding a ghostly intimation of something that could have been there but for the extreme heat of the firing process, metaphorically acknowledging the delicacy and fragility of the rare materials holding precious information now lost in that fire – paper, film, and the like.

In a Western or European cultural association, white can depict the insight and illumination associated with knowledge and learning that expels the darkness of ignorance, but also describes absence and ghostliness, and feels like the colour of weightlessness and silence. Porcelain, paper, white … talks to that which has been denied historically to certain groups. Including in the context of this exhibition, women.

The ghost emerges here as a recognition of the presence of something that is no longer, but that still remains, ‘virtually, insubstantially’ despite the broader emancipatory project of political and social change. (Sterling, 2017, cites Derrida, 1993, p. 10)

Thus, the vessel creates a form in a space, imbuing the object with a presence. And in the case of the porcelain memory boxes and the artbooks, imbuing absence with presence.

The same materials are used in these artbooks, where they may become an object to interpret as opposed to text that is explanatory and which can then leave the viewer to interpret. Sometimes books are not accessible, and the object creates a way for the viewer to interpret or access meaning which is denied them. These objects become the link between the text and the viewer’s individual and unique response and creates the thread between the artist’s intention in making the object.

MAIA (LEVAN) LEHR-SACKS

Artist Statement

It all starts with a Point. Not necessarily the point - but a point nonetheless. The point that marks the careful intersection between a horizontal and a vertical line. The origin – the point where two lines intersect at a perfect 90 degree angle. The zero point of both the x-axis and the y-axis. The beginnings of a coordinate plane.

If we were to use a piece of paper to illustrate this, we could imagine folding the piece of paper perfectly in half lengthwise and then width wise and then opening it up. the piece of paper will then be divided into four equal quarters. We call this a 2 by 2 grid. Two rows by two columns. If we continue to fold each division in half we can continue to a 4 by 4 grid and then an 8 by 8 grid etc. Now we have a two-dimensional coordinate plane. We can locate any point on the plane with a pair of numbers corresponding to the x and y value of any two intersecting lines. This particular point is a bit like when I had just learnt how to write and I used to write the same word over and over again until the forms of the letters lost their meaning and just became marks on the page.

What happens when a piece of paper is folded over and over again into seemingly perfect divisions - but I know that it is not perfect. that it could never ever be perfect because each new fold scored into the paper shrinks the paper minutely. Usually one would not notice such a small shift, but once you have folded a piece of paper 128 times it begins to lose its shape. Not all the lines are straight anymore. Not all of the 4096 squares are the same size. It might look like it but if you look closely you will see that they are not. Then to fold each square back onto itself until each linear row and column transforms and undulates under the new tensions within the folded object. When a body or object does not follow the horizontal and vertical axes they become dis-orientated. When an oblique body becomes disorientated it becomes an object. What happens when one commits to living in an oblique world; a world that is off-line to what is given. A deviation. An oblique intersection. A disorientation and disturbance of the order of the lines and directions that things follow within time and space. In trying to find the point I have found so many other points and intersections. In attempting to find a meaningful point to the work and to myself - I tried to make everything meaningful. I have come to the conclusion that we use words that do not work to make sense of a world that does not work. So now I admire the dust in the corners and I get lost in trying very hard to find nothing to look at.

Artist Biography

Maia (Levan) Lehr-Sacks graduated with a BA in Visual Arts (Fine Art) from Stellenbosch University (cum laude) in 2019 and is currently completing their Master of Fine Art at Michaelis School of Fine Art. Lehr-Sacks has exhibited their artworks on numerous exhibitions both national and international. The most notable achievements in the past few years include an installation of eighty paper sculptures exhibited on the group show The Space Between (2016) at The South African Jewish Museum, having an artwork selected as one of the New signatures top 100 (2018), and participating for two years in a row in the Tankwa Artscape Residency (2018 and 2019) at Stonehenge Private Reserve in the Karoo. Documentation of the works created on the 2019 residency was exhibited on Contemporary Nature, an exhibition in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania.

KRISTEN MCCLARTY

Kristen McClarty’s body of work is concerned with the visual demonstration of existence, memory and the passing of time. And more particularly, the build up of these things in a space or on a surface. In this exhibition, these themes are taken to textile work with a focus on natural mark making and stitch. The textile pieces are anchored by a botanically printed and marked hemp silk cloth, hanging from ceiling to floor, recording, celebrating, and mourning, all at once, the changing domestic arrangements in a home with children reaching adulthood. The repetitive process of making dinner for the family is evidenced by a pile of onion, shallot, and garlic skins, set aside over time, and used again to pass pigment onto cloth. This raw edged cloth commemorates each meal conceived, cooked, and shared with the dwindling family unit, as children grow up and leave to make their own dinners in their own homes. A recording of time in a language of love.

Kristen’s art practice rests on an ongoing push and search and for ways to make a mark and new surfaces to make those marks on. Experimentation with the sheerest of textile papers, Abaca, usually used for the archival rehabilitation of damaged documents and manuscripts, has resulted Kristen’s natural marks on a surface that appears quite fragile and ethereal. These crumpled and torn fragments, holding thought and memory, are anchored to Japanese handmade paper and linen gauze, with tiny scattered stitched knots made with vintage thread, found, forgotten in a haberdashery. Holding down slow contemplation, onto a surface.

Kristen has made a series of collaborated pieces with paper folding artist Maia Lehr-Sacks, alternatively natural printing, and folding sheer papers. The artwork “Metalasia marked stays” was first botanically printed with seeds of blombos in bloom, and then passed over to Maia to intricately pleat – a piece reminiscent of stays used to keep a woman’s body in society’s desired form. Other pieces were first folded and then surface printed, using experimental techniques, and later passed back to Maia to unravel and unfold, revealing the ghost like marks under the top surface and in the creases.

Kristen’s small, stitched message and memory cloths are concentrated and detailed records of sentiment and the things she has found on her wanderings. Layered words and symbols, on scraps of cloth discarded from other processes, fixed together in the style of Boro mending, closing holes and filling spaces. Trying to find answers to unresolved questions.

This body of work complements Kristen’s more traditional printmaking work, with a focus on woodblock and monotype print.

Kristen’s art practice rests on her regular wanderings and walks in the environment close to her home, recording the changes in places over time. She is particularly interested in the evolving scratchings and words on natural and fabricated structures. This dirty graffiti evinces the lives of members of the community and visitors to a space, with symbols and words superimposed on what was there before, so that the surface becomes a visual display of energy and experience in the space – a palimpsest of colours and intersecting words, some scratched out. The piece “Archie was here” is a stitched journal of what Kristen has found over a period of a year or two, on the walls of the vlei reservoir and the Block House (a WWII observation structure) overlooking the village. The words: Archie was here and he is in love with Theo have become a theme that runs through her graffiti-based work, referencing the imagined evolution of the relationship between Archie and Theo.

Archiewashere , Natural mark making and stitch on silk, hemp linen and cotton isolation

LeftWanting , Natural mark making and stitch on silk, hemp linen and cotton isolation

Dinnerfor4,3,2...,Natural

LINDSAY QUIRK

Biography

Lindsay Quirk was born in 1965, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

She studied Fine Art at Rhodes University Grahamstown and majored in colour etching and Western reduction woodblock printmaking.

Currently based in Kommetjie, Cape Town, Lindsay teaches printmaking, produces her own prints and works with various forms of paper and stitchwork.

Artist’s Statement

Drawing on her love of whole or broken China with its myriad of processes and motifs, an entirely deconstructed version has emerged in this collection of paper moulded platters.

These quiet, restrained, emblems of time and place are a departure from her fantastically worked, patterned, iconographic and richly coloured pieces.

Soft organic shapes, textures and tones emerge from a process of paper smithingapplying and moulding several printmakers papers, layer by layer, strip by strip. Pared down, quiet space is permitted to hold its own as artwork.

The notion of the dish on which to hold or serve is now transmuted into a form that serves messaging.

The faintest of cloth partially encircles each piece and slow graduated stitching hold memories whilst simultaneously closing out noise and allowing thought.

A shard, the only homage to decoration, centres.

I,II,IIIIV,Paper, cloth, stitch, shard and gold leaf, 30cm diameter, 45 x 45 x 7cm each, 2022, Framed

JO ROETS

Capetonian Jo Roets is a passionate sculptor, painter and mould maker. Art has always been a central theme in Jo's life and art practises are interwoven in her education and professional careers. Her school years included Sculpture and Ceramics subjects at P.J. Olivier art school in Stellenbosch. After matriculating in 1997 from Hoër Meisieskool Bloemhof, she furthered her studies and obtained a Diploma in Art Direction for film and television as well as an Advanced Diploma in Motion Picture Production Design.

Jo's background is in the film industry where she worked as an artist in the art department. She also had a fulltime lecturing career, lecturing in painting, prosthetics, special effects, props fabrication, sculpting, mould-making and casting at a multimedia film school. In 2017, after 14 years as a senior lecturer, she exchanged her lecturing apron for one of a full time artist.

In 2018, Jo's work was selected for three prominent art competitions: Sasol New Signatures, Pretoria Art Museum (finalist); Tollman Bouchard Finlayson Art Award Barrel Head Exhibition, Hermanus (finalist) and Vuleka, Art.B Gallery, Bellville (finalist).

She was announced as the winner of the inaugural StateoftheART Gallery Award in 2018 and had her first solo exhibition, Mantra Mãe, in 2019 at StateoftheART Gallery. Her second solo exhibition, Murg, was shown in 2022. Her work has been exhibited at wide variety of South African galleries, including SMAC, Stateofthe ART, Lizamore & Associates, Rust & Vrede, Art.B, GUS, Imibala, Nel, Art Afrique, Breytenbagh Gallery, No End Contemporary, Art@Africa, Johann van Heerden, Art on Avenues, Christo Coetzee Museum and Trent Gallery. Apart from participation at gallery exhibitions, her work has also been exhibited at festivals around South Africa. These include, KKNK, Hermanus FynArts Festival, US Woordfees and Tulbagh Arts Festival.

She is currently exhibiting at various local and international exhibitions (online and physical) including South Africa, Spain and Canada.

Jo was recently announced as one of the Tollman Bouchard Finlayson Art Award winners as well as an awardee of the coveted Sustainable Arts Foundation grant for 2021.

Fabrication

A Message Folded, Moulded and Stitched