ENTYATYAMBENI. An exhibition of fabric art featuring botanicals at The Cape Gallery until October 18. LUCINDA JOLLY reviews.
FROM the same people who hand-stitched the largest tapestry in the world, the award-winning Keiskamma Tapestry – whose subject matter is the history of South Africa – and which hangs in the houses of Parliament, comes an exhibition of fabric art featuring botanicals called Entyatyambeni, Xhosa for “in flower”.
The Keiskamma Trust, whose members created these fabric art botanicals, have a particular history which started 13 years ago when the current director of the Keiskamma Trust, then a non-practising medical doctor and artist, Dr Carol Hofmeyr, and her husband, Dr Justus Hofmeyr, arrived in the small Eastern Cape town of Hamburg.
Moved by the poverty of the local people and her strong belief in the artist within, Hofmeyr began providing embroidery classes to create income and as a therapeutic practice for the people.
The botanicals project was an offshoot of the tapestry project and began when Cathy Stanley, Keiskamma Trust’s Cape Town co-ordinator, happened upon a book of botanically inspired textile designs by the architect Josef Frank in David Bellamy’s fabric shop, Bellamy & Bellamy. Cathy persuaded Bellamy to lend her the book.
Entyatyambeni, true to its name, is a flowering of the success of an intrepid spirit of people at risk and an honouring of South Africa’s profound floral biodiversity. Africa has always woven and stitched. Contemporary artists such as Nicolas Hlobo use stitching and weaving traditionally undertaken by women to invert and challenge gender-based stereotypes.
Sculptor Andries Botha also plays with the notions of masculinity and femininity in sculptures which use the weaving skills he was taught by Zulu women.
Made from fragments of fabric from scarlet satin to traditional blue and white patterned Shweshwe cloth, alive with all manner of stitches from blanket to slipper these 54.5cm x 54.5cm panels honour South Africa’s floral diversity which makes up about 3 percent of plant species in the world. According to SouthAfrica.info, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens (in which some of the artists spent time familiarising themselves with indigenous plants assisted by a botanist) is the first botanical garden to be considered a world heritage site by Unesco.
The Cape Floral region, which runs from the Cape Peninsula to the Eastern Cape, is “one of the richest areas for plants in the world. Although it’s only 0.5 percent of the area of Africa, it’s home to nearly 20 percent of the continent’s flora and contains the Fynbos vegetation unique to the region.
The Table Mountain National Park just around the corner from the gallery has more plant species than the British Isles or New Zealand.
The wild generosity and abundance of the floral kingdom seems to have rubbed some of its magic on to the lives of the artists and embroiderers of these panels and turned a life of struggle to a more manageable one.
For Eastern Cape artist Nombuyiselo Malimbeso the project saved her life. For the first time in her life she is the breadwinner and now able to support her four children and elderly mother. She had no idea that she could work visually until she participated in a workshop with an artist. “Now I love it,” she said.
As one of the designers, it is her flower designs drawn either from life or books that are used by the embroiders and it is she who determines what stitches to use, whether chain, satin or slipper stitch, to detail and pull the flower into form.
Malimbeso is half way through completing a 1.8cm x 1.47cm piece of a Madonna and Child with the city of Grahamstown in the background for a church in the same city.
But while these botanical panels may be vivid they are not curio fare. Instead they relook at craft, affirming it as being easily comparable to the fine arts. Botanical accuracy is twinned with the artist’s individuality. Backgrounds tilt and fracture like the lit glass fragments that make up stained glass windows. Colour is highly individual with curious and wonderfully unexpected combinations and the name of each designer and embroiderer is embroidered on their particular panel.
Two years ago these botanicals were seen at the 13th Venice Biennale(Biennale Architettura).
If you’re saturated with the self-consciousness and trying too hard, these simple vivid pieces will capture your imagination and open your heart.
Look out for the wire and felt construction aloes.
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