For one of her critiques as a fine-art printmaking student at Rhodes University, Billie Zangewa produced a strong pastel drawing. It showed a young woman casually, but determinedly, reaching through the picture plane, her hand poised to pluck a fat, juicy strawberry from a bowl of the fruit that had been placed in real space just in front of the artwork.
It was so tantalisingly simple but, in hindsight, so obviously descriptive of this artist who, just more than a decade later, is satisfying her creative appetite by dipping deep into life’s bowl and feasting on the luminous visuals the world has to offer.
”A lot of my work is about me being such a tourist,” Zangewa says. ”Every time I go anywhere, I take loads of photographs. I’m not Japanese and I don’t travel in packs, but I sure am trigger happy with that camera.”
”I’ve never been good at drawing from my imagination,” she adds. ”So I use multiple images to create a story. I just make pictures. I want pictures of something rather than just memories.”
Her lustrous fabric panels are snapshots from her life — the places she has visited, November in Amsterdam, Troyeville Sundays, On the Royers-sluis or musings she has had — offered with a gentle eye and an inquisitive humour that, despite their stylised rendering, pop the viewer right inside the heart of the narrative.
Storytelling is a crucial aspect of these intimate works, although Zangewa says she is using actual lettering far less than in the past. Nonetheless, the roughly stitched speech bubbles that emanate from her elegantly clad guests in the work Irish Wedding, for example, capture such familiar sound bites from a particular situation that one cannot help but be amused. (”Isn’t he hot?” one bridesmaid comments to another, ”Who?” her confidante asks in response.)
The work’s broad appeal is also, in part, as a result of the medium in which they are portrayed. While Zangewa’s structured layering of colour and deliberate rendering of shapes owes a lot to the printmaking techniques in which she was trained at university, the hand-stitched silks provide a juncture between the fine-art and fashion worlds. This was readily evidenced at her solo exhibition opening at Afronova in Newtown, Johannesburg, last Friday where many of the usual suspects from the arts world mingled with fashionistas and designers.
The crossover aspect is not much of a big deal for the artist, who would spend her pocket money on French Vogue as a teenager and did a long stint as a brand manager for Diesel as an adult. ”Many of the really great designers studied art, not fashion. They are artists, they don’t make clothes; they make art.”
Zangewa, who was born in Malawi, says she owes much to Johannesburg and its inner-city architecture for her move into the medium of fabric.
”Jo’burg was part of the big change in me, buildings in town like the diamond building with its shimmering glass. My working with silks came out of me trying to catch the reflection of that light. I try in my way to show it with silk.
”People ask me what I am going to do next and I say ‘this is it, I’m doing it’ … I just enjoy fabric so much, I really identify with it. The sensuality of the surface and then, of course, there is the therapy aspect of sewing. Now I am getting into sequins; I just love them.”
Billy Zangewa’s solo exhibition is on at Afronova in Newtown, Johannesburg, until June