In their paired work, Claire Johnson and Morné Visagie represent bodies obliquely. Bodies are conspicuous by their absence and by what they leave behind - fragments, residues, what they have held and what has held them. In actively bypassing the thing itself, Johnson and Visagie allude to the mercurial nature of perception and the way in which experience is distorted through its re-telling.
Johnson’s series is a continuation of Oddment Batch, whose compositions are drawn from offcuts. The fabric remnants are collected from tailors and clothing designers. One batch was kept aside by a Senegalese tailor who worked in the artist’s neighbourhood: “Bara made custom ceremonial clothing, spending hours with clients selecting fabrics and finalising fits to create garments intended to mark moments in time.” Johnson is compelled by the quiet expression of a practiced hand – the quick, sharp gestures of scissors on cloth. The awkward remainders call up the curve of a neck here, the widening of a hip there. They are traces of an intimate engagement between bodies and cloth.
In time, a garment will lead its own life, moving away from its original role and perhaps outliving its wearer. The narratives it holds will be forgotten or retained as fragments, frayed at the edges.
Johnson’s paintings have a provisional quality, the oil sometimes tentative, sometimes sure on the canvas. The medium is made tactile and porous, bodily. But the body or object – collar, cuff, skirt – is missing. What remains is an amalgamation of odds. “There is no final form. It is now adrift without purpose or construction – ineffable in form and metaphorical in meaning.”
The tonal and textured panels in Visagie’s works are suggestive of small shifts and variations in time. Memory is coloured by feeling. Linear configurations read like scores in The Hours, Philip Glass IX and Fragment I&II, An Affair Below. The latter submerges the viewer. You are swimming or sinking, staring down at the shimmering tiles at the bottom of a public pool. Here you are anonymous, a body among other bodies.
Nautical rope, known for its resilience, is deftly stitched lengthways in Shinjü Blanket I. The rippling cloth is sized to safely enclose two bodies in reference to a suicide pact between lovers. Its generous folds exude tenderness and sensuality, undeterred by morbid undertones. Shinjü Blanket I is less of an ending, than a raft.
In a short fictional accompaniment to an exhibition by Visagie in 2018, Damon Galgut wrote: “Time undoes the world continually, only labour can restore it.” Visagie transforms materials, meticulously processing textiles, ink, oil pastel and pigment to create quietly undulating surfaces. Embedded in this ‘labour’, is the desire to reconcile personal, fictional and historical narratives with physical, sexual and mortal being.
“Do you know what I mean?” Asks the narrator of Galgut’s story, suddenly addressing the reader directly. The question is an appeal for connection, for the feeling of “falling endlessly” to be validated in the experience of another. For Johnson and Visagie, never fully knowing is a given.
Johnson’s series is a continuation of Oddment Batch, whose compositions are drawn from offcuts. The fabric remnants are collected from tailors and clothing designers. One batch was kept aside by a Senegalese tailor who worked in the artist’s neighbourhood: “Bara made custom ceremonial clothing, spending hours with clients selecting fabrics and finalising fits to create garments intended to mark moments in time.” Johnson is compelled by the quiet expression of a practiced hand – the quick, sharp gestures of scissors on cloth. The awkward remainders call up the curve of a neck here, the widening of a hip there. They are traces of an intimate engagement between bodies and cloth.
In time, a garment will lead its own life, moving away from its original role and perhaps outliving its wearer. The narratives it holds will be forgotten or retained as fragments, frayed at the edges.
Johnson’s paintings have a provisional quality, the oil sometimes tentative, sometimes sure on the canvas. The medium is made tactile and porous, bodily. But the body or object – collar, cuff, skirt – is missing. What remains is an amalgamation of odds. “There is no final form. It is now adrift without purpose or construction – ineffable in form and metaphorical in meaning.”
The tonal and textured panels in Visagie’s works are suggestive of small shifts and variations in time. Memory is coloured by feeling. Linear configurations read like scores in The Hours, Philip Glass IX and Fragment I&II, An Affair Below. The latter submerges the viewer. You are swimming or sinking, staring down at the shimmering tiles at the bottom of a public pool. Here you are anonymous, a body among other bodies.
Nautical rope, known for its resilience, is deftly stitched lengthways in Shinjü Blanket I. The rippling cloth is sized to safely enclose two bodies in reference to a suicide pact between lovers. Its generous folds exude tenderness and sensuality, undeterred by morbid undertones. Shinjü Blanket I is less of an ending, than a raft.
In a short fictional accompaniment to an exhibition by Visagie in 2018, Damon Galgut wrote: “Time undoes the world continually, only labour can restore it.” Visagie transforms materials, meticulously processing textiles, ink, oil pastel and pigment to create quietly undulating surfaces. Embedded in this ‘labour’, is the desire to reconcile personal, fictional and historical narratives with physical, sexual and mortal being.
“Do you know what I mean?” Asks the narrator of Galgut’s story, suddenly addressing the reader directly. The question is an appeal for connection, for the feeling of “falling endlessly” to be validated in the experience of another. For Johnson and Visagie, never fully knowing is a given.