P from her mattress
example of that. I know that it may stop me from accessing some nuances but maybe that’s okay. salvaged beds. There are parts of the bed that no one sees or recognises. The artworks in this exhibition are in different stages of deconstructed beds. Some are more worn in. I take my cues from the materials and push it further, accentuating the residue. For example, where there is a bend, I exaggerate this. Once the material is deconstructed, I try and bring back the human connection with the material.
Tell me a bit about the development of your work thus far.
A lot of it is due to economic reasons. Initially in Cape Town, I was just buying foam from the stores and working with this; it was the most affordable material. Then people offered me beds and I started to experiment with different parts of the bed, with the metal springs and dents in the material. You can see this in my earlier work like Blommetjies. When I moved to Johannesburg, I didn’t have to look for beds — the material was found on the street and specific parts of the city. I adapted to what the different cities offered me.
Could you explain the symbolism of working with mattresses?
I was living in Jeppestown. A lot of my neighbours were not able to afford the slightest increase in rent. The beds were burnt because it’s too big to carry to the next space. Some people were not from Johannesburg. I knew a woman who had to go back to KwaZulu-Natal because she could not take her bed with her. We can talk about the life of a mattress — a trace and a map of whom it had belonged to before — in a very abstract way. In some ways the mattresses look like maps of a place or a landscape, a topographical view of an area. I named these artworks after places, some imaginary, some real … mostly fictional but typical-sounding South African place names.
Tell me a little bit about your background.
I grew up in Kimberley. My dad has a keen passion for metal; he worked for a company that made metal gates and I have always had a relationship with the material because of him.
Would you describe your work as political?
I remember when I was studying at the Michaelis Art School at the University of Cape Town, some students made work about clowns and butterflies, etcetera, but there are structures in place that remind you of your blackness, so it is difficult for me to make work about butterflies, even though there is something poetic about the way the butterflies flap their wings. There’s room for both, I guess. With the world that we live in it feels difficult for me to imagine that politics does not affect the art world; that art exists in a vacuum. My work is very quiet. It links to my personality as well in that it makes a statement in a quiet way.