I want to write a celebration of studio visits. Not as a practitioner – I prefer the writer’s solitary existence – but as a visitor. The studio visit is far better than a visit to the museum or gallery, where the works seem to have magically appeared, untouched, on the walls and the artist, if present, is being fussed over by their gallerist, patron or posse. To put it another way, there is a reason why contemporary art has a fetish for process. In ours, the age of infinite products that appear on our shelves and doorsteps by some inscrutable and impersonal chain of supply and demand, there is something nice (perhaps nostalgic) about the studio: the place where the artist goes to work with their hands, to make work that they care about.
It is this idea that urged Lebo Kekana, Lehlogonolo Carol Khaas and Nthabiseng Mofokeng of FEDE to launch Open Studio, a short residency programme at their soon-to-be-demolished arthouse on Roodehek Street in Gardens. They invited three artists – Ciara Dunsby, Micha Serraf and David Goldsmid – to set up shop for two months free of charge, culminating in an exhibition of works-in-progress. Simple as it may sound, having the time and space to work without having to fork out the cash for ever-rising studio rentals is a godsend for artists at the start of their careers. Dunsby is a recent graduate of Michaelis and was grateful for a gentle landing-pad for her post-varsity limbo. Serraf has enjoyed a bit more recognition – he was recently a finalist for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize and presented a solo booth at the Cape Town Art Fair – but is still working from home, sometimes soliciting the help of his mom. Goldsmid told me that, before this residency the majority of his painting happened inside the tiny bedroom of his digs. Friends who slept over complained that they awoke to find him fiddling at them, the paintings, in the middle of the night.
What I like most about studio visits are stories like these. The stories that lay the groundwork from which the work sprouts. The stories that you won’t find in the press release, which presents the artists’ ideas already fully-formed, or even sometimes fully-altered. The stories that ring out from embrasures in the fortress of persona. It is these stories that I want to dwell on here.
Ciara Dunsby tells me a story about a fire. Last year, a fire destroyed the house in Constantia where she lived from the ages of ten to eighteen. She shows me some of the relics from the fire: a melted landline, an ash-blackened mirror, a hat with a hole burnt through it. She has dozens of images laid out on the table as well: in one, a kitchen scene, black lines of water-soaked soot drip down the white walls as if the room itself were dissolving. Dunsby is reprinting these images on coffee filter paper and pasting them over blocks of cement. The concretisation of half-memories, their details, literally, gone up in smoke.
Ciara Dunsby. Courtesy of FEDE.
This work is somewhat of a continuation of her grad show, for which the theme was the death of her grandmother and its accompanying grief. Dunsby has brought two of these sculptures with her to the studio to keep her company. One is her grandmother’s kist, fashioned into a chest of drawers, each filled with Dunsby’s trademark polystyrene coated in cement, save for the last, which is filled with dried tea bags folded to resemble the petals of gooseberries. The way their flesh disintegrates, she explains, seems to be a decent metaphor for memory. It has a structure, but a fragile one. The second sculpture is another modification of the kist, this time fashioned into her grandmother’s drink cart, complete with fractured teacups and saucers embedded inside. Distortions, dissolutions, fractures and fragments are Dunsby’s area of intrigue. Despite the fact that memory-work is a note oft-struck by recent art school grads, her sculptures are extremely compelling. They are like monstrous, domestic chimeras that resonate beyond Dunsby’s personal associations to convey, more generally, the ennui of women’s work at home. Mothers, grandmothers and aunties work not only as housekeepers but also, often, as the custodians of family histories in the form of albums and heirlooms. They are the ones who concretise half-memories with their photographs, teacups and hand-me-down kists. As such, they are the ones who, in the event of fire, lose the most.
Micha Serraf tells me a story about his mother. There is a phrase she repeats often: “Swim today, because the pool might not be there tomorrow.” The phrase has both a general connotation and a literal meaning. The general connotation is that one should accept opportunities when they arise, because they may not come again. The literal meaning is that, in one of the many homes where Serraf’s family stayed in their largely itinerant existence, there was a pool. She encouraged the kids to swim in the pool as much as possible, knowing that, at any point, they might have to pack up and leave; they might not get the chance again.
Micha Serraf. Courtesy of FEDE.
Serraf shows me two tapestries that illustrate this story. The first shows a big blue trapezoid (the pool) into which are embroidered three black marks (representing Serraf, his brother and his sister). The second shows two obelisks standing guard over a green trapezoid. Now that I am equipped with this story, I see Serraf and his siblings gazing forlornly beside a pool riddled with algae – an opportunity spoiled.
The landscapes that Serraf is rendering in wool and cotton thread typically do not have one specific story attached to them. They are nostalgic, he admits, but nonspecific, like memories clumped together to produce a feeling. When looking into his past, Serraf is confronted with a family line punctured by events of flight. He is a descendant of the Jews who fled persecution in Spain for Morocco during the Inquisition. Serraf’s father’s family fled Morocco for a refugee camp in France during the Second World War, and later his father migrated from Europe to Zimbabwe where he met and married Serraf’s mother, a Shona woman. In 2003, the family of five had to flee again, leaving everything behind to start a new life in South Africa.
Serraf is adamant about the fact that he does not want to foment this trauma in his family history. The metaphor he uses is this: “If there’s salt in the tea, I don’t want to dwell on the fact that there’s salt in the tea. I just want to make more tea!” Hence why his tapestries have an eerie calm about them. They recall long drives in the backseat of a car and vistas in movies long past seen. At one point, Serraf announces with delight that the tapestries have a smell, reminding me immediately of the fabrics of blankets and stuffed toys that comforted me as a child in a world organised terrifyingly around adults’ needs.
Micha Serraf. Photo by Tséle. Courtesy of FEDE.
Serraf wants to show me another smell. He takes a lump of recycled clay and coats it with the dust that covers the ground of his studio space (leftover from Andile Dylvane and Kyle Strydom’s installation for Process back in January). “It smells like rain!” Clay is what he’s been working with for Open Studio, since many of his most recent tapestries have been shipped off to New York for a show at C24. They are intuitive forms that meditate on his matrilineal line. That they may seem to be a curious departure from his needlepoint and photographic work (between which there was some throughline) is, in my view, the most exciting part about the studio as a curatorial concept. Curators tend to favour those works that suit the artist’s brand – those works that are instantly recognisable as theirs – while the folks at FEDE seem to value experiments, works-in-progress, even false-starts.
David Goldsmid is certainly using his time at the residency to experiment with new strategies of painting. Trained as an industrial designer at CPUT, Goldsmid has the mark of a good painter. That is, he has that wide-eyed borderline-obsessive expression that I have only ever seen on other painters’ faces, and all he wants to do is paint. The story he tells me is about an eccentric local painter back home in East London who used to invite him over for some underage drinking and painting sessions, from which his love of “the fun” of paint originates. Some of his early experiments can be seen on the floor of his studio space. They portray dense, miniature scenes of surreal violence with bright, sparse, incongruous backgrounds. His most recent paintings are of a larger scale and exhibit more technical prowess. They are studies of the human figure rendered in mirror-image, like a Rohrshach test. They are beautiful figurations that do not seem to represent anything in particular. Goldsmid says that he is looking for some way to objectify the figures, and I think he’s onto something, like when Bresson called his actors his “models” and advocated for a mode of representation that “radically suppresses their intentions.” The painting he is working on when I visit him in the studio is a portrait of a girl he’s been seeing, based off of a compelling black-and-white photograph and rendered entirely strange.
Goldsmid admits that he is still looking for a language in which all of his paintings can converse and, at twenty-three years old, he has plenty of time to find it. What he and a host of other talented artists need at his life-stage is the time and space to figure things out, to try and possibly fail, but ultimately to devote themselves to the practice of making. Thus, this studio residency cum exhibition model is a welcome addition to the network of institutions, dealerships and project spaces in Cape Town, and one I’d be glad to see replicated and refined.
David Goldsmid. Courtesy of FEDE.
