Courting Corrosion: Maureen de Jager on 'In Sepia'
by Michael Smith
An exhibition by Grahamstown-based artist, writer and lecturer Maureen de Jager entitled 'In Sepia', travelled to Johannesburg for a showing at Gordart Gallery in November and December. I spoke to her about the work, her processes and her interest in the poetics of disintegration.
Michael Smith: Maureen, you moved away from Johannesburg in 2002: what has your sense been of the art scene since then? Have you developed an 'outsider' perspective in Grahamstown?
Maureen de Jager: I'm suspicious of the idea of ever having been an 'insider', despite the fact that I lived in Johannesburg and studied at Wits. I have often found the art world and its power structures and workings quite opaque. Nonetheless, being in Grahamstown does afford one an outsider perspective of sorts. In pragmatic terms, it demands greater self-discipline and organisation: I've become very good at writing proposals and applying for funding, given the costs of transporting an exhibition like this from Grahamstown to Johannesburg.
Although the experience is sometimes alienating, I think living and working on the periphery has its advantages: I feel liberated, in the sense of not being held to ransom by the fickle demands and hollow approval of the art scene. I find I am able to make work that is more about what I want, in accordance with my own convictions. My creative stimulus derives for the most part from my interactions with my students at Rhodes. I prepared for this show in a studio space shared with students, which was a very mutually beneficial experience.
MS: Since your undergraduate days you've been working with rust, patina, the phenomenon of surfaces accruing marks through natural climatic or environmental occurrences. Why do you think this has remained an abiding interest for you?
MJ: I think that results from my enduring interest in the Gothic ideas of dissolution and decay, the antithesis or flipside of progress. The idea interests me inasmuch as one's sense of becoming is often underpinned by a simultaneous coming undone: the creative process for me thus combines the act of making and the processes of undoing, which are often indistinguishable. Working with mild steel lends itself, metaphorically, to these complicit notions of creation and corrosion: rusting follows its own momentum, and I am interested in the fact that I'm not able to exert absolute control over it. There are constantly elements of unpredictability, transience, change and mutability as a foil to my authorial agency.
MS: Usually patina is incidental to an artwork's existence, and is often viewed as something to be removed to reveal the true, original nature of the work. I think this is an interesting link in terms of your show 'In Sepia', which decisively uses rust to explore origins, or formative memories.
MJ: I guess I'm really interested in exploring traces of origins, the documents of childhood experiences as starting points. The process I follow in making works echoes the natural process of degradation to which some of my sources, old family photographs of my childhood in Kuruman, are subject. Due to chemical breakdown and long-term exposure to light, these photos are undergoing their own deterioration, gradually turning sepia with age. It's almost as if a layer of rust is obscuring the images beneath. The degradation in these photographs mediates as another layer, and makes the 'original', the moment and experience imaged in the photograph, seem even further away. Through these photographs' dissolution, one gains an understanding of the memories they represent as tenuous and unstable constructions, not necessarily accurately grounded in or reflective of the 'truth' of those childhood experiences.
In the resulting artworks, the partial disappearance of the image beneath a layer of rust becomes symbolic of the inaccessibility of the original experience as we move further away from it in time. As human beings we obsessively collect traces of our pasts: the photograph is powerful because of its so-called indexical nature, as if it 'proves' the veracity of a past experience or memory. Yet the photograph is an unreliable witness: like memories, photographs sometimes fail us. They are subject to erasure through time and neglect; they fade and disintegrate; they often-times fill us with misrecognition and doubt.
All of these notions are referenced repeatedly through the media and processes used in this body of work. The rust, while being corrosive, is itself ephemeral, and could be removed with the touch of a hand. In this series of works, I have chosen to fix the rust with clear lacquer, which I suppose speaks to my own ambivalence about wanting to preserve the images I have made. But rust is very pervasive: one is conscious that it wins in the end.
MS: If you don't mind me saying, your practice isn't terribly 'girlie'. There's no sewing, no collecting, no painting in pink or red: rather, big steel sheets, an undeniably industrial aesthetic, and the deliberate courting of corrosion. I always got a sense at undergrad level that your work so avowedly eschewed these kinds of trends in fine art by women as to be deliberately different. Do you think your decision to run with what is arguably a fairly masculine, even macho, medium and related process was ever a conscious one?
MJ: Yes and no. Even though steel appears to be quite a macho, industrial surface to work on, the process certainly isn't. Rusting is slow and accretive, and in my work is the result of careful application. It is a poetic process, because while steel may seem to be so macho and resilient, it is ultimately compromised by something as gentle, ephemeral and seemingly non-invasive as wet air. This is one of mild steel's most intriguing contradictions.
There are also other contradictions that interest me: as a clean surface steel appears cold and reflective, yet the rust it acquires is warm and absorptive. The rust in my works reminds me of a shipwreck in Cannon Rocks on the Eastern Cape coast: though it's a tragic and evocative spectre, epitomising neglect and decay, its orange patina is very seductive and beautiful.
Because of these contradictions, working with steel is a continual negotiation between seemingly irreconcilable extremes, often with highly unpredictable results. One of the works on this show had to be redone seven times before I was satisfied with the outcome: six of those seven just didn't work despite the fact that I'd used the same process each time. Perhaps my affinity for big metal sheets, as opposed to sewing for instance, is located in the pleasure that I derive from this negotiation. I enjoy the sense of battling with a strong-willed opponent.
MS: How do you apply the photographic images to the steel surface?
MJ: The original photographs are enlarged digitally into a metre-by-metre format, and printed out as a series of A4 pages which I photocopy. These photocopies are then transferred to the surface of the clean steel sheet with Wintergreen oil, which loosens the toner and deposits it onto the steel surface. After that, I work successive layers of rust onto the surface, by laying a wet cloth over the image for several days. But the whole process is trial-and-error: some photocopiers make prints that don't work, certain kinds of toner aren't dissolved by the Wintergreen oil, etc.
MS: I'm interested in the letter as artwork: there's Robert Rauschenberg's Portrait of Iris Clert, Sol LeWitt's 'phoned in' instructions for creations of wall drawings, and even locally, the handwritten letter Kendell Geers' headmaster wrote to his father congratulating him on smacking the young Kendell, which the artist exhibited verbatim as a found object many years later. What is your sense of the letters in your show, transposed as they are into the conventions and dimensions of painting?
MJ: The letters, like the photographs mentioned earlier, are fragile markers of the past - they were written to me by my grandmothers in the two decades between my birth in 1973 and their deaths in 1994. Both grandmothers died within months of each other and just before my 21st birthday. I chose a large scale - 1,25 x 2m - as I wanted the letter works to be monuments to my grandmothers. It was also important to me to retranslate the originals, rather than using them as found objects. Once I had enlarged and transferred the text onto the clean steel sheets, I painted shellac over every typed or handwritten character, thereby masking the text so that I could rust the surfaces around it. This laborious process matched my investment in the letters: in literally rewriting my grandmothers' letters I was compelled to contemplate every word.
The letters themselves have their own history: they arrived in Grahamstown in a small school suitcase courtesy of my father, who decided on the occasion of my first purchase of a house that I could now store my own 'junk'. In amongst the collected objects I found these five letters, and when I lined them up chronologically I realised that they traced the aging processes - the increasing vulnerability and progressive deterioration - of my two grandmothers. The early letters are confident, witty and deftly written or typed: the later letters are so full of mistakes and references to loss that they begin to speak about a compromised agency.
This realisation was heartbreaking but also strangely revelatory: when one is a child one tends to believe that one's grandparents are all-powerful; after all, they're your parents' parents! In retrospect one understands their vulnerability. These works explore a real sense of my grandmothers' aging - and, by extension, my own.
MS: The school suitcases operate in a different aesthetic and conceptual realm: where the steel works are artificially aged, there seems to be an intention to preserve the suitcases in a pristine condition.
MJ: The little white suitcases act as carriers for past traces, and are thus a literal reference to the container in which I found my grandmothers' letters. But they also speak about a particular era - in this case, the late 1970s - and as such reference school and childhood in a particularly nostalgic way. They link, for instance, to the photograph where I am pictured with Jannie (du Toit, a next-door neighbour) on our first day of school. We are both carrying those same suitcases.
I created this series by making a mould of an existing suitcase and producing casts in Crystacal (a calcium-based casting agent that is similar to plaster). On the lids of the suitcase sculptures I have engraved some pages from my primary school workbooks, showing my early attempts at learning to write. The sculptures thus draw connections between my shaky acquisition of these skills and my grandmothers' respective losses of that capacity.
At first I tried imbedding bits of steel in the casts: the moisture in the Crystacal resulted in some rust stains seeping to the surface. But I didn't like the stains, and rejected these, redoing them as pristine white casts. Their precious, pristine quality, in the end, acts a kind of foil to the decay evoked elsewhere in the show. It speaks about a fervent (if futile) desire to keep the past safe and protected from the corrosive effects of time and forgetting.
