Yvette Gresl
Needlework has become a significant form of economic empowerment for rural women in Southern Africa. Initiatives in Zimbabwe and South Africa have created opportunities for women to learn skills such as appliqu, embroidery and beadwork.
Although needlework is increasingly recognised as an emerging art form, it is specifically targeted at the tourist market.
Material Matters, a current exhibition of appliqus by women of Zimbabwe’s Weya collective and other South African needlework collectives, is curated by Brenda Schmahmann, a senior lecturer in the history of art department of the University of the Witwatersrand.
The Weya women use black cotton panels as a background for pictorial narratives of their everyday life experiences. Their picture-stories are structured similarly to those of cartoon strips.
The makers of the appliqus often include a written explanation of their visual stories that is tucked into a pocket in the front of the appliqu.
The appliqus speak of survival in an impoverished community where women are unable to earn independent incomes in the face of overwhelming domestic responsibilities. The stories that they tell evoke with humour and sadness the paradoxical emotions that characterise relationships integral to female rites of passage: courtship, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and widowhood. We are drawn into narratives that speak of love, passion, abuse, loss, pain and suffering. The appliqus seem to have given Weya women a voice for expressing many issues that are taboo within their communities. One of these is Aids.
Joyce Mukoyi’s Aids the Killer is the poignant story of a woman whose husband dies of an Aids-related illness but not before passing the disease on to his wife.
The Weya appliqus challenge popular assumptions about tourist art, craft and traditional African art.
While tourist art provides a decorative memento of journeys to unfamiliar places, needlework is often considered unworthy of intellectual consideration.
But the social commentary that characterises the Weya appliqus challenges such prescriptive ideas about tourist art and craft.
The categorisation of African art is especially patronising as it assumes that African culture is static and unchanging. The Weya appliqus reveal how African creative traditions shift with changing economic and social circumstances.
It is the challenge to the often patronising assumptions that we make about tourist art, craft and African art that makes Material Matters an exhibition worth seeing.
Material Matters is at the Gertrude Posel Gallery, Ground Floor, Senate House, Jorissen Street, Braamfontein, Tel: (011) 717 1365, until May 22. A book accompanying the exhibition is for sale at the gallery and Exclusive Books