Illusion Of Abundance

The abundant availability of natural resources in South Africa has sustained an illusion of economic convenience that has made many citizens and their households overlook the cost of manufacturing energy in any form for the consumption of an ever growing population.  

The illusion of ubiquity of these resource regimes also exacerbates the disregard for  
the environmental cost of extraction and manufacture of commodities consumed on  
a daily basis; and the waning predictable pleasure of abundance recedes to fear  
when these resources become scarce. 

With consumer and media culture geared to deluding the young of affluence and   aspirations of grandeur, we are now faced with an entitled populace; lacking in conceptual innovations that can leverage their livelihoods and enrich their bloodlines for posterity.  

Each one is seeking momentary satisfaction at the expense of future joys, bypassing the present as invaluable, but the indigenes have to cultivate a subliminal resistance to those virulent distractions, feeding our common disregard of poverty, our collective needs, as well as love for ourselves and others. 

But when we contemplate the inevitable demise of all ecosystems due to our insatiable lust for forcing the earth to yield to our muster, we are left with a solemn picture of a derelict place inherited by generations who never revered splendour. 

In a country where descendants of missionaries and settlers have overthrown  
indigenous people’s sense of determination, now emerges a spiralling nationalist fervour that assimilates even their most sacred identities as symptoms of difference  
from their African brothers and sisters.  

When contemporary political discourse has veered us far from ancestrally ordained   futures, to the detriment of life systems of the planet, what ways are there for us to  
rediscover life? 

Can an economy of minimal things align our desires to be cognisant of the impact of our consumption on the planet when the illusion of abundance is feuling ubiquitous exhibitionism? 

And as our fear of “missing out” and conspicuous consumption has altered the  
architecture of our cognition, as a species, we have to develop a vast ecology of intimacies with other species on the planet. We need to encounter our eternal entanglement with all that is around us in order to venerate and evolve an empathy that is beyond curiosity. 

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Existing in a country inundated with rampant crime, unemployment and teenage pregnancies, there is need to survey how this population growth impacts our place on the planet.  

Theories of anti-nativist nature are certain to fail among a populace that has elevated sexual promiscuity to an art of self-love, where men boast of deflowering young women who happen to be one’s son’s age. 

A population that has become arbitrary about the privacy of intimacy, where sexual  
demeanour is explicitly flaunted as gender conquest will inevitably grow gender  disparities that will become violent as each detest one.  

Development and population growth and urban expansion of social territory has altered landscapes and affected human and non-human inhabitants.  

Yet each person dreams of having their own acre of a dream farm without asking how that dream will impact the environment. 

Todays society is obsessed with accumulation and ignores warning that consumption of resources has longstanding effects on future generations and their livelihoods. 

Anti-natalist social theories has been flagged as a dangerous notion among black communities and this increasingly accepted norm has the potential for catastrophic  
population growth that will cripple world economies. 

Younger generations of South Africans caught between seclusion and expansion through technological exposure, have no clue about the importance of water and the impending scarcity faced by future generations, because water as a vital natural resource is proving to be finite in the face of a species that is wasteful and negligent. 

But what moral and social infrastructure is available to shape a collective awareness of legitimate concerns around environmental issues when communities can cut down tree because of fear of criminals hiding in the foliage?  

How can we educate the current generation to sustain longterm change in behaviour, and develop a reverence for the planet as source of their continue existence on the planet, in order to bring humanity from the precipice of self- 
annihilation?  

*** 

Our resolve that is faltering in the face of growing rise of influencer culture has veered to barbarity in guise of alliance, where frivolous lusts are fulfilled through instant gratification. Our dreams are for lack of a better word, juvenile, and are not vigilant of the present as it approaches catastrophe. 

Abundance, as an impermanent condition with profound political, social and economic implications, has begun to rupture man’s inflated self-reliance and super-ego.  

And at the expense of all non-human entities on the planet, this lack of empathy for life has led to a breakdown of many rules-based system of social life, where economic inequality escalates a variety of planetary events that range from global warming and forced displacement of populations through migration. 

The joys of ethical living within the rapid rhythms of contemporary existence have  
been manipulated for profit and isolationist dreams are personality traits for many  
facing a world founded on potentials of affluence.  

And in this lonely quest through the complex entanglements of lived and imagined experiences, mankind has woven a cocoon for their hibernation from the catastrophes playing out in realtime. 

Obsessed with automobiles as symbols of sexual attraction, branded apparel as  
garbs of nudist aspirations and lenses as portals for voyeuristic perversions filtered  
and airbrushed for monetised exhibitionism; these are traits of demeaned and commodified bodies parading their final ritual chorus as masters of a dying planet.

Of Strange Materials And Textured Dreams

Discarded objects can be equated to excavating them, an honorary act that imbues them with new life, and this is evident in the works of two South African artists who have taken textile art to levels of social interrogation and memory excavation often approached with pragmatism by most contemporaries.  

For Lerato Motau, fabric combined with other everyday objects such as cords, threads,  
and cloth, become physical materials that speak meaning beyond their nature,  
becoming at once recognisable and estranged? 

Drawing from photographs and images that connects her to memory, the various figures woven into her tapestry evoke a nostalgia for portraits of both the paternal and maternal, the familial and social, exposed within her hued backgrounds that quietly renders her figures and scenes vulnerable though venerated. 

Her textured portraits are contemplations that often disregard symmetry and similitude of any specific figure, these randomly yet fragile transformations bear semblances of known personages. 

Subtle rhythms of daily life are retold through embroidery, with a sense of whimsical   painterly play, a dynamism of stitching delicate fabrics with luminous threads integrating icons into the ornamentation of tapestry. 

In her work, she reflects on sociocultural figures using reformulation of semblances  
of persons within the collective imagination, literary and musical icons, as well as  
other political personages that continue to shape the contemporary social  
consciousness. 

With a willingness to question what is given, there’s an unsettling awareness of self- 
observation in each artwork; where each work explores how identity dissolves through personal and impersonal obsessions with becoming another. 

It appears that through each manifestation of form pours out some spiritual residues from her personal experiences, her selection of materials and objects serving as a stylistic and ethical choice, putting her emotions into artistic assemblages. 

Through myth, memory and reference of past figures and the feminine , Lerato brings ritual celebration of weaving and stitching into proximity with present situations of social reflection.

The works cultivate and articulate gestures of nurture, where space for social fermentation is engaged beyond the medium as a tool but a form of storytelling; where beauty is emerging as an unfinished force of the ordinary, where her blues evoke concepts of sky and abundance of imagination, some kind of conceptual horizon at a distance but proximate. 

 

Fabrics complete her materially layered scenes anchored by a single figure around which fragments of faces emerge, unmasking the power of femininity and individuality in the midst of circles of social worth.

Convening the past’s congregant souls (and their cultural codes) into the present’s unfinished histories, here, the art of stitching is transmitting and translating cultural  
inheritance that resists possession, a type of memory entrusted to her without it being owned, a craft that lived through successive generations of women in her family. 

Textile materials and Lerato’s palette of pinks and crimsons become surrogates for  
creation, hybrids that not mere after-thoughts but intended assemblages that both  
disturb and harbour unresolved obsessions, reverent appreciations and iconic  
remembering.  

Yet, this cheerfulness of her colour palette hides a crafty way the artist employs to  
address social encounters remembered and recounted, and these colours invoke a  
serene meditation on memory.  

And encapsulating her portraits are azure shades rendered onto tactile fabrics as  
backgrounds.

In stitching feminine figures in their floral glamour onto these backgrounds of calm  
yet tense backdrops, Lerato is performing a ritual that transmits meanings of pride  
and self-reclamation of vulnerable identities endowed with beauty beyond materials

Her handwoven artwork asks how addictions are formed through obsession, are they inherited like traumas or conditioned manifestations of a festering inner  
wound?

*** 

 Amogelang Ngake 

In Amogelang Ngake’s immersive mixed-media textile artwork, objects ranging from cocks and bottle caps are incorporated and absorbed and crafted into representations, speaking in dialogue with the common uses of these objects from a subjective point of view that suggest contact, wear and loss.  

The cocks and bottle caps, for instance, woven into tapestries reshaped yet shrouded in the aura of their ruin; they, as repositories of memory, are soberly transformed into tablets of evidence of dependence.  

The untamed flow of her practice with these inanimate materials makes her a co-author of a new reality, where each object detached from their embedded utility and function become remnants of a vulgarity that shredded one personal fabric of being. 

Like layered forms in a process of repair this work seems to drip or crumble off the walls, decaying into dream forms of newly built worlds that are in constant evolution yet frozen in asymmetry.

 

And although the work seem fragile, as though it would fall from the walls, these vulnerable materials blend to convey questions of how one material state can condense another meaning; with a robust recognition of latent traces of faded meanings inherent in them.  

 

Amogelang’s is a complex practice of reorganising materials into relational forms  
that speak of abstract ideas such as addiction, longing, and decay of memory are visible throughout his globally exhibited works, where objects are used to think through abstract behavioural and psychological patterns obsessively oppressing many.  

On Amohelang Mohajane's Art

Objects are composed of shifting and unfinished histories that continue to inherit  
them, and on the surface these concealed stories of their extractive creation remind  
us their perpetual impact on present ecosystems.  

These objects often don’t decay in the classical sense of physical disintegration,  
they continue to exist as sediments of our consumption and regurgitation, as the  
paradox of creating the good that eventually harms. 

 

In this way, objects, these mass-produced consumer materials can be organised by  
colour and texture, just as Amohelang Mohajane transforms tires, rusted wires and  
other trash into sweeping and sculptural topographies. 

Their former finite natures are reconfigured, reimagined and modelled into forms  
that speak to both the horrors of their entangled states of matter, as well as their  
enduring power to transform societies. 

Rusted wires, beads, wooden sticks and tire strips are material that don’t necessarily degrade, and though dependent on the exactitude of their function, once discarded, new functions and utilitarian meanings arise.  

Her work reveals how meaning is produced and transmitted through objects,  
meaning summoned without the causality of the collected objects. 

Drawing on the dismemberment of each material, she examines how fibre, cloth and  
metals shaped by hand, can embody both tradition and transformation; how they  
can become devotional forms maintained through cultural symbols.  

And in her hands, all these objects coalesce into a single form like intentionally generated errors or mishaps.

*** 

Here, the artists merely create conditions for materials to illuminate their  transformation, approaching the unknown not with fear but curiosity as a vessel of matrilineal knowledge.  

When the spontaneity of assembling these objects seems guided by their ancestrally inscribed talents; their work simultaneously questions established convention of display, as many of her pieces break dimensional standards and protocols, allowing them to own any space and embrace the unpredictability of the final exhibited form to the fullest.  

Their work rarely seems intact, instead they feel fragmented, recurring and changing, rejecting figuration and rectangular framing in favour of organic shapes and forms, adopting a pictorial space detached from reality but influencing how reality is viewed. 

When viewed together, Amogelang, Amohelang and Lerato’s works allow newer registers of experience, where associations emerge gradually as fragments of traditions of ornamentation; where tapestry becomes a vibrant and contemporary artistic medium that combines traditional craft with a visual language of modern painting.  

These are three important female artists of differing generations, who employ the woven cloth as a a canvas to interrogate divergent ways of creating intergenerational connections to memory and identity, while questioning the far-reaching influence of colonialism on artistic practices inherited through birth.

And their persistence with the craft of weaving and stitching fabric, not as a mode of creating permanence alone, shows how art produced as a product of ritual, a repetition of an art from antiquity, is a continuance bearing a capacity for new beginning.

*** 

Images Found from Artist's Online Profiles