Artist looks back on a childhood in segregated South Africa

FRANK RUHRMUND sees the work of Louise Wright at the Daisy Laing gallery

There are certain words in our language, such as holocaust, that when seen or heard induce an immediate sense of revulsion; another is apartheid. A policy or system of segregation on grounds of race, as many will recall, this was the policy adopted as a slogan by the successful Afrikaner National Party in South Africa in the 1948 election, guaranteeing the dominance of the white minority in the country. Although resistance to it, both at home and abroad, intensified during the 1960’s it wasn’t until the 1990’s that it eventually ended, and a peaceful transition to majority rule came about. All of which owed everything to the astonishing efforts of the lawyer and politician Nelson Mandela, who suffered life imprisonment for the good of the cause, and the country’s then President, Frederick Willem de Klerk. Their contributions to the emergence of a new democratic South Africa were acknowledged in 1993,when each was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

One of the witnesses to the troubled apartheid years in South Africa, but only as a child, was the St Agnes-based fibre artist Louise Wright, who is now enjoying her second exhibition at the Daisy Laing gallery in Penzance. She is an acclaimed dab hand at the traditional craft and technique of wet felting, which she uses to express difficult personal themes with the works in this show. Displaying considerable courage, she looks back through family photographs, taken from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, plus, of course, her own memories and experiences of what life was like for those who were fortunate enough to be part of the privileged, white minority in South Africa during those years. Exploring difficult personal themes, she takes another look at those days, and re-assesses how she now feels about those childhood memories in light of all that she has since learned. It can’t have been easy. As she says: “Studying the family photographs from that period, plus those of the other side, those taken by the African photographers Ernest Cole and David Golblatt, that depicted something of the horrors that took place in the name of apartheid, was a challenge to me.”

It was one which demanded that she reconsidered all that she recalled of her childhood in white South Africa, and look again at her family’s history, which she had previously avoided but now knows was a fable. Understandably, there is something of a dreamlike quality in the wet-felt pictures she is showing

here, as she boldly attempts to re-order the past. Only Louise Wright herself can say if she has succeeded in doing so, but both her gallantry in attempting to do so, and the high quality of her actual wet felted images, are to be applauded. Well worth a visit, admission is free, and ‘Felt Like Family’ can be seen in the Daisy Laing Gallery, Penzance, until September 4.

Work from the ‘Felt Like Family’ exhibition by Louise Wright, left