Just a little note to let anyone interested know that I started a new blog on wordpress at http://thechroniclesofgen.wordpress.com/. Hopefully this new blog will be one that I actually update quite regularly. And I will be shutting down this blog in the next few weeks. Thanks for the love. Gen

A charcoal drawing..

I no longer remember the concept of this piece which I did in 2007, but I remember choosing to copy this old photograph I found because I loved the construction of the photograph. This family is obviously trying to portray that they are wealthy and live luxuriously (by the curtain in the background and their clothes), that they are a 'modern', educated and a progressive family (the globe and books are objects chosen to indicate this), and lastly I love how the father is compositionally placed as the top of the hierarchy of people, as though to emphasize that this is all due to his influence... it makes me laugh.


Drawing on such a large scale (its 2m long) was quite challenging.. talk about an intimidating white page. But I really enjoyed working in charcoal, and loved the mood it allowed me to impart on this piece. I also used a little bit of green chalk-pastel so as to get that old photograph look.

Transfiguration: my 4th year art.

My final fourth year art exhibition, Transfiguration, occurred in Gallery-in-the-Round in Grahamstown in 2009.

In the exhibition catalogue I wrote that "this exhibition centres on processes of change and renewal. Through using the human skin - which is constantly regenerating itself - as a metaphor for personal transformation, the works that make up the exhibition are personal glimpses into very private moments of conversion. The works vary in their tone and approach to the processes of transformation, yet they all allude to the complexity of such a process. Change is not easy and the exhibition reflects this: the sculptures are caught in their own practice of handling change...

Sprouting Figure

...The texture of the silicon has been used to simulate the tactile feel of skin; it is flexible and gives the figures a quality of bodilyness that shifts them from being purely static, impenetrable sculptures to having an element of transience and lifelikeness. The three nooks built into the gallery act as changing rooms and this alludes to the possibility that the viewer, like the sculptures, can renew him/herself too."

The sculptures were made from silicon moulds of my own body (achieved through an extremely traumatic moulding process -for which I thank my Sculpture Girls for their help) and all of them were built up in peeling layers of thin silicon. For this exhibition i created three full figures (one sleeping and two standing) and a rack of hanging silicon skins.

The Sprouting Figure is clothed in flowing nondescript garments and was positioned in front of a mirror, half turned from the initial approach of the viewer. Her arm is lifted but it is only on very close inspection that the viewer sees she is holding a pair of tweezers and is in the process of plucking the sprouts from her peeling face.

Dressing Figure

The Dressing Figure stands poised, dressed in a bath towel and loosely grips a skin hanging from a coat-hanger that she seems to have a distant intention of putting on: of changing into it, replacing her worn skin with a more pristine version. But she is turned away from this pristine skin and instead she seems to be looking at the rack of broken, worn and torn skins across the room.

Rack of Skins

Sleeping Figure
The last figure is the sleeping figure, who is curled up into a foetal position and is entirely naked. With her closed eyes and vulnerable position, she seems self-absorbed in her transformation; the viewer clearly feels they are intruding into her most intimate, private moment.
This Sleeping Figure featured in the Rhodes University Student Exhibition as well as the 2010 ABSA L'Atelier exhibition and catalogue.

And here is a link to an article written while the Sleeping Figure featured in the Rhodes University Student Exhibition: Grocott's Mail (pg. 12)

Environmental Trophies for Rhodes University

I was chosen as the winning applicant for my design for Rhodes University's Environmental Trophies. So I got the commission and these were the final products. I had to design a trophy for each of the four categories. I really loved making these; they were great fun, and turned out beautifully too.

Check out these links for articles featuring them:

Rhodes University website

Rhodos: The Rhodes University Community Newsletter (pg. 4)

Grocotts Mail (pg. 3)

Conceptually, my design centered on the bee; how a single bee can make a difference to the hive in protecting the hive or gathering pollen, but in a swarm, where many bees come together, they can become an unstoppable force. Protecting and saving the environment is exactly like that. If we each as individuals do as much as we can individually, together we are unstoppable.

So in each trophy there is a mini swarm of real bees set into the resin. Additionally, in each trophy is the nature that Rhodes is upholding as needing to be protected. For each of the four categories in Rhodes' Environmental Awards I chose a different selection of natural materials, so as to make them part of a family of trophies, yet be distinctly different.

I made these trophies using a silicon mould, and pouring layers of resin into them and setting the natural elements into these thin layers.

3rd Year Art

This is some of the work I did in my 3rd year of my Fine Art degree. We had different projects to experience doing different processes.

Self-portrait bust.

This white cement bust was done using a waste-mould process (a once off massive plaster mould). It was an exhausting, yet incredibly satisfying process to sledge-hammer my sculpture out. This was on the Rhodes student exhibition in 2008.

An Unstable Identity

A chair and hatstand titled An Unstable Identity; it appeared in the ABSA L'Atlier exhibition and catalogue in 2009. The feet are moulds of my own tiny size one feet, and thus literally i am somewhat less stable than others on my feet. It caused me to start thinking about my tiny feet as a possible metaphor for an unstable foundation and what happens to what is built on top of something precarious. Can it ever be truly stable?

Another interpretation that someone told me they derived from it is that of the discourse surrounding the instability of the white identity in South Africa. However, this was by no means in my mind at all when I made this piece. But it was the first time I made an artwork subtle enough to have someone else find meanings in it that i wasn't intending and I loved that. That is something I wished to cultivate: an open-ended quality in my works.

This piece was made from CrystaCal and found objects and used a silicon moulding process using Body Double.