Bubblegum Club

Tag: femme artist

  • Robyn Kater: the intersection between history, identity and the city as a living organism

    Robyn Kater is a bold, passionate and multifaceted artist who is deeply inspired by the city of Johannesburg and all those who live within it. She views her home city, Johannesburg as the compelling and rich space that has greatly influenced her personal identity as well as artwork. The 23-year-old freelance artist, who recently graduated from WITS University with her Fine Art degree, relates her journey as that of self-discovery, learning and unlearning as well as one of trial and error.

    The use of Johannesburg as Robyn’s leading inspiration has motivated her to produce a powerful body of work titled, ‘Toxic Playground’. Robyn describes ‘Toxic Playground’ as a mixed media installation that comprises of photography, video and found objects through which she examines how the Johannesburg mine dumps become palimpsests of personal memory and toxicity. The ‘Toxic Playground’ installation consists of 100kg of sand which was collected over three months from the Riverlea mine dump – this is of significant sentiment to Robyn as she grew up in the community situated right next to the dump.

    ‘Toxic Playground’ is emblematic of the socio-economic and environmental issues currently facing the residents of the area, and essentially speaks to the community’s concerns. This is because the city’s mine dumps have been normalized to be included in the community’s everyday landscape, yet they are severely toxic. They symbolize the exploitative deep-rooted nature of the city. Robyn’s body of artwork raises important questions that require effective answers such as: “what should be done with remnants of the city’s division post-conflict, post-apartheid state? What influence do memory and remembrance of these places have on transformation of the city’s spatial morphology (formation), identity and flows of everyday urban life?”.

    In all aspects of this work Robyn does the job of detecting the intersection between history, heritage, identity, displacement and space. Robyn eloquently expresses how she is “interested in the city as a living organism and how the tangible and intangible fragments meet and overlap to form a lived experience”. An in-depth interpretation of Robyn’s artwork demonstrates that she thinks of Johannesburg in various ways. She sees the city as a complex living organism in which certain spaces act as remnants of personal memory and of an overlapping history. In addition to this, her unique artwork illustrates a vivid relationship that the city of Johannesburg presents between space and identity.

    Robyn is open to collaborate with people outside of the art industry such as historians, architects and urban planners. She would also like to have to the opportunity to exhibit her work at more experimental spaces. Having showcased at Wits Art Museum, The Point of Order as well as Nothing Gets Organised and with the hopes of showcasing at Zeitz MOCAA someday, Robyn is truly one fearless trailblazer who is more than ready to get her message across.

  • A Picturesque Death is Micro/Macroscopic

    UK based artist Holly Hendry creates a sculptural realm in which the visitors of her rather dystopian world can see a symbiotic union of the micro and macroscopic world. Up and close, a visual presentation of what lies below. Her work digs below the surface and exhibits that which is buried, hidden, out of thought.

    A graduate from the Royal College of Art, Holly has gained fair traction with shows at White Rainbow in London and BALTIC in Gateshead. And why wouldn’t she? Few artists have the tenacity to have a practice that makes death quite so picturesque.

    Often utilizing building materials to mold her creations Holly’s work inhibits certain universal connotations referring to topics such as the dishevelled hidden universe underneath pristinely designed interior spaces or the insides of the human body.

    Fabricating her scene of death and forgotten objects with the use of birch ply, cement, rawhide dog chew and soap, these elements are all masterfully held together with metallic lilac and pink tones. Despite the artist often remarking in interviews that she is uncertain as to whether her materials tie her pieces together; I am here to throw that statement out of the window and may it never be uttered again. Holly’s pastel colour palette, which meets elements such as light woods and pristine whites, fall on the viewer’s eyes with ease and concurrent poise.

    Holly’s sculptural plane can be described as having a preoccupation with what is below us, thus granting Holly the title as a sort of sculptural archaeologist, and she pertains a fascination with the micro world. This micro world may be in fact shown to you on a larger than life scale. Perhaps it is a model of plant layers or layers of skin. Organic shapes are designed to Holly’s will and we see the world in a way that is not truly possible.

    ‘Wrot’ is a piece that has drawn me to this artist. Filling a single room, the cross section of green, blue and grey is given definition by stray bone forms and nails. This display is marked off by three bubble gum pink walls. Looming above the podium are three white structures, creating an illusion of a regimented above and shambolic below.

    Physically her work dramatizes the variation of surface and plane. With a harrowing shift between macro and micro objects and spaces visitors are able to examine for themselves impressions of various objects and bodies. Holly’s work is successful in dramatizing various aspects of the circle of life and presenting it with allure and a theatre like quality.

     

  • Kyra Papé – Between Seduction and Sickness

    Bulbous and sickly-looking forms installed at The Point of Order during the Situation exhibition in 2016 both enticed and disgusted viewers. Having encountered the work of emerging artist, Kyra Papé for a while within the Joburg art scene, I decided it was time to have a chat and try to get a deeper understanding of a studio process which puts her as the artist at  a rather serious health risk.

    Could you elaborate on your use of sugar as a material/medium that fuels your practice?

    My initial engagement with sugar was a rather intuitive response while making. I was busy making a sculpture in the kitchen, using a blowtorch, and I decided to grab the pot of sugar. It has been a part of my process since. Its complexity in meaning in my practice however has developed considerably over the years.  Sugar, as a material, embodies a deeply personal and vulnerable corporeal relationship that I have with food. At the root of it all I have an extremely sensitive body with numerous allergies and intolerances. My very first allergy was and remains to this day, lactose, the sugar found in milk. Over the years, my body’s increasingly become more vulnerable to other materials, namely: sugar – (Lactose, fructose and sucrose), dairy, gluten and sulphonamides. Sugar abjects me, my relationship with it is violent and aggressive yet, I am obsessed with it. I am fascinated by it as a material in all its facets and continuously explore its alien existence with my body on a daily basis.

    ‘ISL01’ 2017 by Kyra Papé

    As an artist working with sugar, once the work has been made and is exhibited outside of yourself, what sort of contexts are you placing the works in and what sort of titles are given to them? I’m trying to get an understanding of what sort of inroads you give to a viewer to understand your work within the broader context of culture and society, apart from the particular narrative you have personally with sugar?

    The main inroad I use is through installation and the relation of the works physically to the viewer.  I allow the viewer to touch my sculptures. I find their disturbance of the clean white spaces quite intriguing. As my sculptures are messy and sticky, often an unwanted aspect in a gallery space, I find them to be absorbing of people’s need to touch in a ‘no touching’ space. The sensorial aspect of the sugar in my odd creations invites the viewer into the space of the work however remains repulsive to them simultaneously. The viewer’s own embodiment prompts a push and pull with the forms through the uncanny relation between themselves and the forms.

    To be a ‘child’ again, desperate to touch this ‘thing’ that you are told you are not allowed to but are now actually allowed to, draws me in as a maker into understanding the role of material. While the works are rooted in a complex personal embodiment, sugar is a material understood cross-culturally to carry meaning in varied contexts, although I never overtly state that the works are sugar, it is always in the labelling of the works. Essentially I am through my own personal avenue of exploration, inviting the viewer to experience and explore the complexity of sugar, nevertheless it is their individual experiences of the sculptures and prints that carry the most nuanced meaning for me.

    ‘Untitled (Conversation)’ 2016 by Kyra Papé

    What has your research component in your Master’s focused on and how has that had an impact on your studio practice? 

    My masters focuses on material in relation to sculpture and printmaking. I am engaging with the validity of the use of an autobiographical and auto-ethnographical approach as a means of research through the production of a creative body of work. I am also exploring the role of the material, the object and the thing, and how their existences challenge boundaries. I have situated my focus on the process of making less. It is vital for me that the sugars impermanence leaves the sculptures in states of flux, never really being complete. The research component of my work has challenged me to be more critical of my own presence in the making and to claim the personal as a necessary avenue in why I do what I do. Vulnerability is not so easily faced and the theoretical process in relation to the work has allowed me as a maker to explore on a deeper level the nuances of my making.

    What do you see the relationship between drawing and sculpture to be in your own practice and what sort of role do your drawings have?

    The drawings are a fairly new exploration in my practice and I am still engaging with their role in terms of my sculptures. Practically, they are exploring further the behaviour of ink and sugar when the boundaries are disturbed that I have been engaging with. The main pull for me at the moment however is the alien-like quality of the forms. I am intrigued by how their delicacy invites the viewer intimately into the drawing, yet maintains a peculiarity.