The biology of David Bellamy’s art
David Bellamy expounds the secret of life and being part of the solution.
Except for its roof, David Bellamy’s single-storey cottage in the False Bay suburb of Muizenberg is hidden behind a wall of brick and plants. The bright turquoise roof looks like a neat brush stroke against the mountain and a blanket of blue sky. The garden, hints of which peek over and through gaps in the wall, is strongly fragrant on a piercingly hot Cape Town spring day. Bellamy’s dense thicket garden, with remnants of its long-past incarnation as an English cottage garden, supports an abundance of mostly indigenous plants, and the leaf litter on the ground feeds insects and supports bird life. It’s paradise.
The garden is the theme of Bellamy’s new textile design, Thicket garden — seed bomb and features in his new exhibition, Artist’s Textiles at the Irma Stern Museum. Seed bombs are balls of seeds which are thrown into fields to introduce vegetation. Artist’s Textiles serves too as the launching pad for Bellamy’s new project, Museum of Making and Tomorrow, a platform to highlight environmental problems and their resolutions, sidestepping arguing and polemics.
Bellamy studied biology at the University of Witwatersrand before leaving SA to join the anti-apartheid resistance movement and to study fine art at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. He identifies as both an environmentalist and an artist, and is the founder of Bellamy Bellamy, a textile shop on Muizenberg’s main road where you find his designs, vintage South African textiles and imported fabrics, including luxurious cotton velvets and Belgian linens. It’s a treasure chest for lovers of design and textile.
The house where Bellamy has lived since the early 2000s is a tidy mess. The kitchen is cluttered with collected porcelain and ceramic crockery, jars of preserved food and white and grey striped pebbles. On surfaces throughout the house there are curated still lifes of vases and plants and flowers. There are shells and statues of dogs, and artworks everywhere.
His studio is a converted garage. Bellamy flips through a book with images of 1930s fabrics that designer Josef Frank, an Austrian who fled Nazism, created for Swedish design house, Svenkst Tenn. There are designs of intricate and vibrantly coloured flowers, oversized plants, trees, birds and insects. Like Bellamy’s work, the images are fecund and happy. On the studio table are squares of heavy linen on which David’s “thicket-garden seed-bomb” design has been hand-stencilled using low-toxicity and water soluble ink. The linen squares will become bags. Under a protective cover is an armchair upholstered in the same design. Bellamy says the textile argues for “endemism and for sharing the natural world with our planetary next-door-neighbour Earthlings in perpetuity ”.
“Art is about joie de vivre,” he says. “And so is the natural world.” As an environmentalist, Bellamy is aware of climate catastrophe. “Bad environmental things happen all the time so the secret of life is to put our weight behind the good things and make sure they happen faster than the bad things.” But he is committed to not being gloomy, which is clear in his art and in his lifestyle.
His strategy is to work on a project “about me being the solution. I need to name the problem, then resolve it, to show people the solution, and hope that they are attracted to what I’ve done.”
What can you expect at the exhibition at the Irma Stern museum? Bellamy’s brief to the 11 participating artists was to create “a two-dimensional artwork on the wall, its interpretation or rendering into a textile (also two dimensional) then the textile’s movement into three dimensions as furniture, lampshades or clothes”.
The concept of textile is used broadly. Zayaan Khan, a seed librarian, has steeped wool in a solution made from wild plants. She has used this wool and kelp to weave objects. Sanell Agenbach has made a ceramic textile. Greg Stock’s drawing machine produces patterns on cloth responding to data sent from scientists at dams, enabling us to visualise our relationship with water availability. Ruan Hoffmann presents a ceramic painting and a blue and gold colourway water lilies fabric.
Bellamy says: “The content can be decoded if you look for it. You might find issues of biodiversity loss. Otherwise just enjoy the beauty of the pieces.” ● LS
Artist’s Textiles, curated by artist, environmentalist and textile designer David Bellamy, is at The Irma Stern Museum, University of Cape Town, until December 8.