Mark Coetzee On show in Cape Town
The art forms traditionally relegated to women and the manner in which these are produced have undergone radical change over the last decade. Judy Chicago with her The Dinner Party once and for all destroyed a categorization based on production associated to gender, and highlighted that the visual art product must be interpreted on quality and the artist’s ability to use the chosen media in an innovative way.
In South Africa, Hennie Stroebel’s embroidery work entitled Port of Plenty has been hanging in the National Gallery’s “establishment” first room forever. A similar piece won him the Volkskas Atelier award in 1989. Another embroiderer, Sandra Kriel won a merit award on the last Cape Town Biennale.
In A Passion for Quiltmaking: Exhibition of Selected Contemporary Quilts, there are many traditional quilters, drawing mainly from the North American tradition of shared patterns and designs. There are also many purists who believe in the ethic of hand – as opposed to machine- stitching.
Many still rely heavily on the “feel- good symbol” of the quilt as warmth and protection, the creation of an ideal world: super-life, shared stitches, and sisterhood.
What is most fascinating is that quiltmaking is obviously informed by the movements of modern art. Odette Tolksdorf’s much lauded The Backbone is Connected draws directly from abstraction as practiced by Erik Laubscher or Cecil Skotnes. The quilters have their say on texture, colour and surface; and simplification of that surface in the same way the post- painterly abstractionists did in the 1950s and 1960s.
The most innovative and engaging works on show are by the quilters who defy the resistance towards quilting as art and also subvert the prejudice of woman as traditional crafts-person.
They represent a reality based on a different view of womanhood. By placing the quilts within a gallery context, this is partially achieved. It is pushed even further by three of the exhibitors; Wendy Huhn, Celin de Villiers and Norma Slabbert, who understand the post-modern thrust of reference and comparison of material, origin, history and text(ile).
Although Wendy Huhn’s work Home on the Range fulfills the definition of a quilt as a fabric-sandwich, two pieces of cloth with batting (normally cotton) put together with rows of stitching, she pushes every element of what is expected.
Not satisfied with found “scraps”, she silk-screens her own fabric two female nudes of Mannerist origin. One, the Allegory of Love by Bronzino holds the golden apple of the Hesperides, but also wears that power-symbol, the Jean-Paul Gaultier cone bra, as well as a colonial hat that rests atop her Italianate locks.
She sits astride an Aga (the post-World War I stove), those that were so successfully marketed to persuade women that domesticity can in fact be fun, functional and hi-tech, thereby averting any challenge to imposed patriarchy.
The other nude is held aloft or trapped by the antlers of some depraved hunter’s trophy, monumentalised by being presented at the summit of a classical column.
Huhn’s hard-hitting feminism is balanced by a wonderful Pop/Op art patterning in lurid colours that shouts against the muted flower prints of the traditionalists. Her only quilting intervention is the honest machine stitching in blocks to emphasize the Op art character of the surface.
A Passion for Quiltmaking: Exhibition of Selected Contemporary Quilts is at The Arts Association of Bellville, Library Centre, Bellville
Norma Slabbert herself exhibits a piece entitled How to Make an African Quilt III which brings to mind a traditional Sotho blanket. The image of a black child is repeated across its width. Two bands of text are also silk-screened across: “This seven- year-old girl was raped. Her alleged attacker appeared in court and was given bail. Now both are missing”; and “Innocence betrayed”.
Slabbert conceptualized this not only as a quilt but also as event. Every fifth repeated image has been shot with a South African Police service pistol. The surface of the quilt is pierced and burnt where the bullets penetrated. The function of the quilt, like the girl, is lost.
While so many of the traditional quilts are vibrant with texture and colour, this artist has kept the colours and texture quiet and somber. Simple brown, grey and black remind one of the iconographic image of Hector Petersen.
Celin de Villiers has placed a half- perspex, half-fabric corset or bodice on a pile of folded linens (for bed, table and curtains). These rest on a series of wooden spikes, like the bed- of-nails in a circus (to be on exhibition or on show), or that of a torturer (caught by the trappings of one’s own surroundings).
The corset might come from a bridal gown – the contract of entrapment. De Villiers has simply quilted the Jacquard weave patterns in the fabric. She looks at the baggage of white linen and the labour which keeps women “in their place” through the upkeep of these white linens. A subversive view on quilting and the possible entrapment quilting itself can place women in and the prejudice associated with “woman’s craft”.