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 and Amogelang Ngake, 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.
Her handwoven artwork asks how addictions are formed through obsession, are they inherited like traumas or conditioned manifestations of a festering inner
wound?
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.
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 Amogelang 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.
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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 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.
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.
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Images Found from Artist's Online Profiles
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