Lump in the bed: Gerda Scheepers’ ‘MOTHER BROTHER’

A review by Keely Shinners on the 26th of April 2024. This should take you 5 minutes to read.

blank projects
06.04 - 18.05.2024

Thursday afternoon. April. Its light is astringent¹. There are tulips on the front desk of the gallery. I can’t help myself. I’m staring at them. They are my favourite flower. They remind me of my mother. Tulips are her favourite flower. If you ask her why she’ll say it’s because it’s her mother’s favourite flower and if you ask her why, well… Mothers bestow us with all sorts of inheritances, including a certain attunement towards beauty.

The exhibition is Gerda Scheepers’ MOTHER BROTHER, and in the centre is a sculpture fashioned from wood, foam, fabric and metal clamps. The fabric is the stretchy cotton of clothes, blankets, thermal underwear and, if you stand on one end, it looks like an enormous bed with laundry strewn about it. A memory bounds into me. It is Sunday morning. I am so young I can hardly form complete sentences. My sister and I are lying in our parents’ bed, playing our favourite game. It is called Lump in the Bed. To play the game, the parents pretend that the children hiding underneath the covers are not children but lumps in the bed. They pat and push and pull to try and straighten out the lumps, but to no avail. Giggles ensue. Looking back now, I think the pleasures we took out of the game were twofold. First, we enjoyed being under cover, in the soft dark, surrounded by our parents’ smells, reminiscent of our time in the womb. Second, we appreciated the ruse; we gave our parents a reason to touch us without having to undergo the embarrassment of asking to be touched.

Gerda Scheepers, MOTHER BROTHER (2024), Installation view at blank projects, Cape Town

I meditate on this memory because it helps me to approach what I think Scheepers is trying to accomplish with this series. These works, primarily made from acrylic and acrylic inks on canvas, take pleasure in being under covers. They operate in the world of nostalgia. They seem, to me, to be asking the question, “Is nostalgia embarrassing?”

Gerda-Scheepers, ROOF II (2023), courtesy of blank projects and the artist.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start with what I mean by they take pleasure in being under covers. At first glance, Scheepers’ paintings may appear to be mono- or dichromatic. Upon closer inspection, however, one notices several laminae hidden underneath the surface colour. In ROOF (II), traces of magenta appear in the corner of a painting otherwise opaqued by blobs of kelly green. In Skirt, a sudden burst of yellow flashes on the edge of the painting where the canvas has been stretched over the frame. In Tie Back, faint reds eke out from behind a coil of black, like blushes or wounds.

As for nostalgia, one need only look at the titles in order for childhood memories to arise. There’s COPY ME, that game we used to play to equal parts delight and irritation. There’s that mundane apparatus, HEADREST, at which we stared, bored, on long family drives. There’s BROTHER, coming to scoop us up with his big arms. And there are the CLOUDS that entertained us with their shapes and stories. The fact that these subjects are rendered in a minimalist style – verging, at times, on abstraction – speaks, I think, to how youth was simple, untethered from the real and thus uncomplicated. Or, at least, we choose to remember it that way.

Gerda Scheepers, BROTHER (2024), courtesy of blank projects and the artist.

Which brings me to my question: “Is nostalgia embarrassing?” To put it another way, “Is it wrong to long for one’s innocence?” This is assuming that children are innocent, which I do. When you are a child, you are innocent because you are untethered from reality. The closer to reality you become, the more complicit you are in its violence. On a personal level, nostalgia can be beautiful because it can assuage the pain of violence and remind you of the gift of your life. However, on a political level, it can be very dangerous. I am thinking about how the genocide in Gaza is predicated, in part, on Zionism’s nostalgia for its biblical past. By assuming a God-given right to the land, it is easier to disappear those people, places and histories that contradict the imagined past, namely the Palestinian people². Within this framework, nostalgia is weaponised. It produces the bravura needed to exact violence. It justifies the right to murder, to maim³ and, most tragically, to steal the innocence of children, of whom the Israeli military has reportedly killed some 13,000 since 7 October.

I am thinking about this example partly because I find it impossible not to, and partly because Scheepers has included in this exhibition a painting called MOTHER BROTHER GAZA. It is a large work, two metres by three, with delicate underlayers of blue, white and grey that have been painted over by six big, black circles. In this work, I interpret a reckoning with censorship, the brutality of obfuscation and the necropolitical desire to blot out the past. I see nostalgia at its worst. Then, I turn slightly and see CLOUD, a work that is exactly the same size but, this time, graced with misty whites, dusty pinks and musty beiges. I am reminded of the sunsets that have offered me consolation in sorrowful times, sunsets that my mother adores; she who applauds the light when it dips below the horizon. Nostalgia at its best.

In the ongoing reconciliation between the personal and political, art is a pressure point. I am always moved when an artist tries to face, on the one hand, utter beauty and, on the other, utter pain. I like to think about it as an act of reestablishing the meridians, the pathways along which vitality and solemnity flow in equal measure. I am grateful to Scheepers for this invitation, embarrassing as it may be, to look back on the lump in the bed and smile, to face the present with a lump in my throat and cry.