The most desirable item in Jo’burg right now is an Yda Walt lampshade. The new work by this dancer-turned-fabric designer is satirical and suburban while paying simple homage to the city streets.
These are old-fashioned lampshades. The kind your grandfather might have sat beside after dinner, once grandmother had fetched him his newspaper and pipe. They’re lampshades in rich colours, with tassels, that speak of good society. They remind us of recent trips to pawn shops and charity shops where the decaying furniture of good old Johannesburg goes, a stop on the way to the lounges of the poor.
To comment on our situation today, Walt has taken to the metropolis. She’s taken snapshots of the post-apartheid signs we encounter in our daily lives, such as Miriam Makeba Street and Nelson Mandela Bridge. These have been juxtaposed with older names, such as Commissioner Street and Market Street. These remind us where we came from as much as they tell us where we are going. And although the issue of changing street names has brought about heated debate, Walt’s lamps cast a gentle glow and they make a gentle comment on the historical moment.
‘The lights have come about as an opportunity to do something different,” says Walt, who is known for previous fabrics that depicted popular logos found on matchboxes and mealie-meal packets.
‘All are hospice finds. I am a hospice junky and I go shopping once a week. Once I have found the bases I strip the fabric off and then the new fabric is stretched by a commercial lampshade manufacturer.
‘A friend of mine is a demolition yard junky,” she says, ‘and that is where I got the metal lamps. The finished items will be left to chance. We will put the shades and the bases together and see what looks best.”
Other lamps depict city signs indicating places of congregation, such as ‘public phones”, and there are cushions and handbags reading ‘Muti for good luck in business and marriage”.
The central items on exhibit are a series of wall hangings, based on African blankets, showing women shopping. These are familiar characters that pass us daily, weighed down by goods in giant bags, some with towers of acquisitions balancing on their heads.
Walt says: ‘The panels are based on a larger tapestry of mine commissioned for the Supreme Court. It has gone into the judges’ library and is seldom seen by the public that is why I decided to make a smaller version of that work. It is titled I Love Jozi. On it are five ladies, plates of fruit, signs and people shopping. These works are printed on blankets and padded out.
Partnering Walt in her show at Parkhurst’s adventurous design shop, Amoeba, is ceramicist Loren Kaplan. Here large, pale, organic-shaped vases and small, white bell-shaped tea lights open a window to the sculptor’s internal world.
‘I got into ceramics through a bad depression and took to the clay in my gut,” says Kaplan, who seeks out cross-cultural symbolism as decoration for her work. The lotus flower from Egyptian burial urns is repeated and she points to a mysterious pattern she believes appears in all religions called ‘the flower of life”.
Kaplan’s show includes a number of small, grey basalt and white porcelain ‘botanical” bowls and a dramatic chandelier that, for its new owner, will require plenty of space.
Kaplan studied photography in the Eighties but then joined commercial ceramicist Anthony Shapiro in arguably the most successful pottery venture in South Africa. In the affluent suburbs, in the Nineties, the country’s transition was discussed at dinner parties over salads served from Shapiro’s black, cone-shaped, Afro-Asian inspired bowls.
And this is no joke.
Kaplan and Walt are teachers in their respective disciplines and it shows in their work. There’s something deliberate and defined in what they turn out. The work requires patience and planning and involves assistants and, one assumes, apprentices. While they might not entirely agree with this sentiment, a minimum is left to chance.
While Kaplan says the combined exhibition reflects ‘internal and external worlds”, both artists seem frustrated with the practical aspect of their crafts. Kaplan says: ‘I am unorthodox. I have done things that people who know too much would not do. But I don’t care.” And Walt says she is phasing out her teaching and seriously considering going back to the more impulsive art of dance.
Yda Walt and Loren Kaplan’s exhibition SHIFT runs until December 13 at Amoeba, corner 4th Avenue and 7th Street, Parkhurst. Tel: (011) 447 5025.