Women From South Africa

"I have a sort of thought process I go through. And what I normally do with my accompanist is that we will talk through the whole show beforehand. You go through every song and we say, oe be careful of that part, and that part and remember to do that there and so on. You get all those things out of the way and it’s filed in your brain, so by the time you walk on stage you actually do it for the second time"

"And after that I always tried to do that with every show and every album, there are no throw-away songs and they must all stand strong"

"I am not thinking of a cut-off point yet"

"Terribly! Yes, yes, yes, and also, it’s quite important for me to be nervous, because if I’m not then it feels like it doesn’t matter enough"

"It depends on what crosses my path, rather than me initiating it. And sometimes the chemistry between you and a musician is just perfect and then you just go with it"

"“I founded it and helped get sponsors and partners on board and there is an emphasis on parallel career development and not just athletics career development.”"

"“We are an ultra-mad country where people normally think a marathon is for sissies and you have to run 90 kilometres to be considered a proper runner”"

"“I always ran hard and athletes knew when I was in the race it would be a hard race. I ran fast from 1500m all the way up to the marathon. I broke world records, got an Olympic medal and won a world title.""

"“I loved the opportunities that I had and it was 10-15 of the most amazing years of my life. And I love it where I am now trying to help produce the next generation of South African distance runners.”"

"“A day that starts with a run is a better day. I retired 10 years ago and have run the odd marathon as a charity participant running with people trying to finish their first marathon, but nothing more than that, really”"

""My best days still start with a run in the mountains – I run for good health, energy, and to clear my head!”"

"Williamson ran a series of workshops where she explored the power of place and its identity to various citizens. At the end of the workshop, a consensus was reached on how best to exemplify their feelings around that particular place."

"Williamson is a social commentator and combines slick aesthetic devices with hard, cutting edge facts of life. This is almost contradictory, yet it is precisely in this tension, that we are both lured into the artwork and then come away thinking about the issues, the image thus returns to text as it were."

"Throughout her career artist Sue Williamson has asked viewers of her photos, videos, urban graffiti and other pigeonhole-resistant labours to critically think about how and where they live."

"Williamson also writes and lectures about art, and is the author of the classic ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989). In 2009, she published ‘South African Art Now’ (HarperCollins, New York)."

"Trained as a printmaker, Williamson also works in video, photography and installation. Her work addresses the media, social issues and aspects of contemporary history."

"I enjoyed these encounters. As an artist, one so seldom knows what the reaction of visitors to a gallery really is, or if they understand what one is trying to do."

"Standing at the window through many different weathers, trying to reconstruct that vanished landscape, many visitors to the gallery came up to me to chat, and recall their memories of District Six, or asked me what exactly I was doing."

"As far as was possible, I worked from old archival photos of the district, first engraving, then inking up the areas with etching ink, and finally cleaning the ink from the surface, so that only the ink in the lines remained. I used a tin of ink I discovered in my studio, dating from the 80s and made by the incomparable T E Lawrence of London."

"I am trying to reconstruct a vision of District Six as it was in the 1960s,"

"The fragile and ephemeral process of candle smoke Victor felt was an appropriate medium for the portraits of the primates rendered fragile and impermanent by mankind."

"Victor's smoke portraits explore subjects often overlooked, for example South African prisoners awaiting trial and missing children. These portraits capture individuals caught in a vulnerable moment, an idea reinforced through the impermanent nature of the medium used."

"Victor made another series of large smoke drawings of farm animals on glass called "Brief Lives", which were displayed in an abandoned abattoir. The glass drawings deal with the loss of body and identity and the nature of the smoke speaks of the transience of life."

"The technique of using ash as a drawing medium developed from printmaking. Texture and tone in etching is produced when rosin dust is sprinkled onto an etching plate to create an aquatint."

"The portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper. She was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself."

"The images I am working with are taken from our daily media coverage of recent and almost commonplace happenings in newspapers, on TV and on radio of social and criminal acts of violence and ongoing unnecessary deaths – occurrences so frequent that they no longer raise an outcry from our public, yet they still constitute disaster in peacetime."

"Due to her artistically unconventional approach, she is often compared to an alchemist. In the creation and production of its works of art, Unite benefits significantly from her strong physical, chemical, geological and historical knowledge."

"Unite is one of the world's most respected artists when it comes to mining. Due to her artistically unconventional approach, she is often compared to an alchemist. In the creation and production of its works of art, Unite benefits significantly from its strong physical, chemical, geological and historical knowledge."

"In Jeannette's work, the degree of abstraction varies. While in the abstract works just discussed the powerful effect of the self-created colours dominates and a very sensual, atmospheric impression is created, the objects in the "Highgear" series with the conveyor frames are clearly recognizable to the viewer. We can clearly see winding towers, machines, wheel bucket excavators, cranes... But even in these works there are undefined areas."

"On her travels, Jeannette Unite collects ore-containing sand from the dumps, as well as dust, overburden and metal oxides. She uses them as a painting medium on her picture carriers, which makes her art something very special. The artworks thus contain waste products from industrial mining that develop amazing colors and patterns when they react chemically, for example, or are melted in the artist's kiln at extreme temperatures (her studio is half chemistry lab, half office, half apartment)."

"She has a deep reverence for all these substances and also a deep knowledge of their origin, their age, their occurrences. For them, it is important that we humans as end consumers and consumers develop a deeper awareness of the fact that practically everything we use every day comes from the minerals and materials we find on and in the earth. We ourselves consist of it! Unite is passionate about mixing, batching, firing, melting and reacting its substances. This passion and energy is clearly noticeable in her work. She works largely in the open air at home, so that the wind and other factors also leave room for chance."

"Mining has been central to her practice since an introduction to alluvial diamond prospecting pits on the Palaeolithic African West Coast beach resulted in her first body of work Earthscars (2004). The exhibition engaged the damage done directly to the earth by excavation, and aligned her concerns with an eco‐ feminist consciousness of earth as body."

"Jeannette Unite also works directly with the products of mining. She, however, signals the artist’s complicity in the industry. Creating her own pastels using pigments ground from leftover minerals and mine tailings she continues the tradition of landscape representation, but knowingly constructs her images from the constituents of land itself."

"I'm not sure I really bought it, but the clearness of the artist's intention and her apparent sincerity cannot be ignored. In the catalogue and abridged essay which appears with the list of works, I found Unite's claims grandiose and her jumps from one subject to another a little unbelievable and unresolved. I also battle to discern the relationship between pretty abstract paintings and a peppering of very specific themes. Nevertheless, as a visually consistent body of work and a thorough exploration of various media I find it interesting."

"Strelitzias and bones are ubiquitously the stuff of still life at high schools and tertiary institutions. Themes of flight, transcendence and masks as well as painting's relationship to music have also been well explored in these contexts. All of the above feature prominently in Jeanette Unite's show entitled 'Sentences', and it is for this reason that I found myself suffering from a sense of deja-vu. Somehow though, I felt reluctant to dislike the exhibition. Perhaps it is the energy which clearly suffuses the show or perhaps the sincerity of Unite's quotes which appear throughout the well-produced catalogue. She may, I guess, believe herself but I'm a little less sure."

"Irma Stern travelled frequently between South Africa and Germany as a child and this pattern continued into her adult life. During the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, she exhibited throughout Europe and was both known and respected there than in South Africa, where the reception of her work was overwhelmingly negative."

"Her heavily-laden brush deposits swathes of colour and a tracery of mark that evokes at times the sweep and syncopation of Islamic calligraphy. The calligraphy that she encountered in the carved cartouches of the lintels of Zanzibari doors and the Islamic manuscripts which she collected, armed and liberated her mark-making. The boldness of her impasto brushwork results in a tangible embodiment of her sitters and their contexts, such that her decision to frame the works using fragments of Zanzibari doors feels completely in keeping."

"Verification of the art must still be done, but from a layman's view it appears to be the same pieces that were taken in Pretoria."

"Searching, I roamed the world—to arrive at the origin—at beauty—at truth—away from the lies of everyday—and my longing was burning hot—then the darkness opened up and I stood at the source of the Beginning—Paradise."

"It's difficult to talk about Southwood's work without talking about the artist herself because she so unashamedly bares herself, warts-and-all, to an audience. Plumbing the depths of her conservative, white, middle-class Afrikaans upbringing, Southwood unearths a nasty cycle of repression, abuse and the coping mechanisms offered her by this society where women occupy a silent and haunted interior. Southwood's candidness about her own disposition leaves a viewer trapped between doubting her sincerity and wanting to know less about a near stranger. 'Too close for comfort', her first one person show, held in 2000, presented the viewer with this dilemma in an all too attractive way."

"Her candidness regarding personal flaws and the cycles of repression and coping that accompany conservative, middle class, Afrikaans upbringing inform much of her work, calling attention to ways in which women are silenced or otherwise repressed in that space."

"She works in a wide variety of media in her artwork, producing sculptures, objects, prints, film, and more, which she often bases on personal experiences and self exploration."

"Shopping and clothing is part of my family’s culture. If something is wrong, you go buy a dress."

"If I had something I always wanted something else, I’m just that sort of person."

"Monroe strikes me as being the quintessential symptom of modern society; displaced, alienated, capable of (and required to) taking on a range of personae without a basis in the understanding of self and agency. On another level, her story is also the iconic intersection of celebrity, causality and death, not to mention conspiracy. For someone whose identity is inextricably tied to her image and nothing more, it seemed right to recast her with a host of screen characters that more accurately reflected on her private experiences rather than her public persona."

"The printmaking process for me is all about seriality - the ability to reproduce, copy, and repeat systematically. I like to think of it as a kind of failed forgery; failed as there really was no 'original' to begin with, just the possibility of many of the same."

"Watching films is no longer an exclusively public experience in cinemas. With the kinds of technologies available today, I am able to indulge my interests in capturing what lies beyond the between frames in films at my leisure, in my private space. These 'autopsied' images seem to give rise to other hidden, secret narratives when characters are caught in freeze-frame, or in the background, apparently unnoticed when not taking centre stage."

"Working with films in this way was very interesting, considering that they were originally shot on film, processed and printed, and now transferred onto VHS or digitized onto DVD for home consumption. This process underwent a curious inversion in this work, as I photographed countless frames off my laptop screen as the DVD played."

"When working through ideas, I don't draw; I make collages. These can be visual, or more often they take the form of bits of conversations, observations and sampled words from pretty much anywhere. For this series, we decided to experiment with exposing photo-based images onto polymer plates, effecting a photogravure process, but combining this with a photolitho process."

"I have been preoccupied with 'forensic' methods of observation and perception for many years. Much of my work requires viewers to take on the persona of a kind of detective, deconstructing and unravelling clues and references that may not announce themselves outright. These clues are invested in the subject matter and iconography I employ but also live firmly in the media in which I choose to work."