CLAIRE JOHNSON
& MORNÉ VISAGIE
ZSONAMACO 2023
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.
CLAIRE JOHNSON
B. 1986. CAPE TOWN, ZA
Claire Johnson lives and works in Cape Town, where she graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art. Johnson work’s as a solo artist and as part of the creative studio Hoick, which she co-founded. Johnson has been part of numerous group shows and fairs, notably the FNB Joburg Art Fair and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.
Johnson’s practice is underpinned by an investigation into the relationships that forms between humans and objects, through the mediums of paintings, print-making, fabric work and video. Johnson’s work first looked at the representation of objects, personal or found, by reducing them to ostensibly abstract forms, questioning the ability of the objects to speak for themselves once removed from their original context.
More recently her work has turned towards the stories and secrets contained within the negative space. Focusing less on the objects themselves and more on the stories and impressions that shape our memory of them. Of late, her focus has been centred around cloth, the intimate and protective nature of clothing and fabric, and how it survives beyond us – telling or concealing stories.
Johnson’s practice is underpinned by an investigation into the relationships that forms between humans and objects, through the mediums of paintings, print-making, fabric work and video. Johnson’s work first looked at the representation of objects, personal or found, by reducing them to ostensibly abstract forms, questioning the ability of the objects to speak for themselves once removed from their original context.
More recently her work has turned towards the stories and secrets contained within the negative space. Focusing less on the objects themselves and more on the stories and impressions that shape our memory of them. Of late, her focus has been centred around cloth, the intimate and protective nature of clothing and fabric, and how it survives beyond us – telling or concealing stories.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS:
AKAA
Art Fair
Paris, FR
2021
Group Exhibition
Nuweland, NL
2021
MORNÉ VISAGIE
B. 1989. CAPE TOWN, ZA
Morné Visagie is a South African artist and curator who lives and works in Cape Town. Visagie completed his MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT) in 2019. He spent three years (2013-2016) training as a professional printmaker at Warren Editions, a fine art print studio in Cape Town. Visagie has had several solo exhibitions, and his work has bee included in many group shows.
Visagie had his first international solo exhibition in 2018 at Nuweland Gallery. “Die Bloue Wis”, was a curated exhibition of works from 2011-2018. Growing up on Robben Island, the Atlantic Ocean that separated Visagie from the Mainland became a recurring metaphor in his imagination, and for the past eight years, the colour blue has been the primary medium in his work; a personal symbol of death, loss, nostalgia, memory, religion, sexuality, exile and distance.
With his recent body of work, “The Last Colour to Fade” (2019), he is researching Robben Island’s history as a place of dislocation and loss for those who have been discriminated against (banished and incarcerated there), and the sea, in this case the Atlantic Ocean, as a transitional space between life and death. Drawing on personal recollections and collective history, “The Last Colour to Fade” offers a meditation on the sea as both a physical and psychological landscape. Memories of Visagie’s childhood spent on Robben Island are interwoven with historical facts, with narratives borrowed from literature and film, and images from art and life. Shifting between first person and third, between his own reflections and those of others, he has found in the lives and works of Adriaan Van Zyl, Derek Jarman, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf and others a shared affinity for water. The sea – changeable, inconstant – reveals itself to be evocative of not only promise and peril, but of sensuality, desire and eroticism. It offers as imperfect parallel the image of the swimming pool and its attendant changing room, evoking a history of the queer body in art and writing.
Visagie’s current and recent works are abstracted interpretations of these themes, where colour and materiality are primary. The works share a persistent seriality, with the recurring image of a pool, the motif of tiles, and repetition of form. Most tends towards fragility, towards a suggested impermanence, made from tissue paper, recycled materials or stained tarlatan cloth.
Visagie had his first international solo exhibition in 2018 at Nuweland Gallery. “Die Bloue Wis”, was a curated exhibition of works from 2011-2018. Growing up on Robben Island, the Atlantic Ocean that separated Visagie from the Mainland became a recurring metaphor in his imagination, and for the past eight years, the colour blue has been the primary medium in his work; a personal symbol of death, loss, nostalgia, memory, religion, sexuality, exile and distance.
With his recent body of work, “The Last Colour to Fade” (2019), he is researching Robben Island’s history as a place of dislocation and loss for those who have been discriminated against (banished and incarcerated there), and the sea, in this case the Atlantic Ocean, as a transitional space between life and death. Drawing on personal recollections and collective history, “The Last Colour to Fade” offers a meditation on the sea as both a physical and psychological landscape. Memories of Visagie’s childhood spent on Robben Island are interwoven with historical facts, with narratives borrowed from literature and film, and images from art and life. Shifting between first person and third, between his own reflections and those of others, he has found in the lives and works of Adriaan Van Zyl, Derek Jarman, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf and others a shared affinity for water. The sea – changeable, inconstant – reveals itself to be evocative of not only promise and peril, but of sensuality, desire and eroticism. It offers as imperfect parallel the image of the swimming pool and its attendant changing room, evoking a history of the queer body in art and writing.
Visagie’s current and recent works are abstracted interpretations of these themes, where colour and materiality are primary. The works share a persistent seriality, with the recurring image of a pool, the motif of tiles, and repetition of form. Most tends towards fragility, towards a suggested impermanence, made from tissue paper, recycled materials or stained tarlatan cloth.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS:
AKAA
Art Fair
Paris, FR
2022
BIG ART
Art Fair
Amsterdam, NL
2020
The Last Colour to Fade
Solo exhibition
WITW/Krone, Tulbagh, ZA
2019
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