Type of book work: Unique / sculptural book-object (one-of-a-kind)
Dimensions: 210 x150
Media: High fired glazed stoneware, bubblegum, lipstick, nail polish
Artist's / designer's statements
10 pages individually made, each containing a glaze resist technique, a
simple "non aesthetic" or a ceramic experiment (broken rule). The slab
"pages" have holes to facilitate the binding.
Emerging in the early 1990s, Belinda Blignaut (b.1968) was one of the group
of young Johannesburg-based conceptual and experimental artists whose
work served as a commentary on the social and political uncertainty of
South Africa, often in challenging or, at the very least, critical terms.
Her work suggests an urgency for protest. Through varied series over many
years, Belinda Blignaut has been processing issues around transformation
with the body at the centre of all. Through an engagement with readily
available and everyday materials, processing immediate surroundings, she
hopes to translate the ways we adapt, a quiet visceral investigation into life
and the creative process.
Surfacing in all she does is an exploration into a more fluid world, to resist
the effects of institutionalized culture. Her recent work takes her interest
in the formlessness and abjection of her bubblegum sculptures into a new
series of misshapen clay vessels and forms. There are combinations of
purely intuitive experiments and wheel thrown or hand-built shapes that
are cut and the individual components joined to make 'an other' whole.
Through these intuitive choices and tactile joining processes, intimacy with
the material is experienced. This experience is somewhere been wrestling
and allowing the object to find its own personality, working from the inside
on all levels. The same experimental processes have been used in her most
recent works using wild clay, which she digs herself. The unknown element
in using less pure clays is what drives her making process today, playing
with imperfection, "error" and chance.
In 2013, from her studio, she began working with children and special
needs people of all ages, providing a space for sensory experience and free
expression for all, allowing this "unlearned" way of making to inspire her
own practice.
Artist
Education
No formal fine art education
Awards
1993 Vita Art Now
Exhibitions
1993 Antibody, first solo, Everard Read Contemporary
1994 Sao Paulo Biennale
1995 Africus Johannesburg Biennale
2011 No Government No Cry and Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, Belgium
2012 Curated and showed on the group show, A Shot To The Arse, at the Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town
2013 BLOWN, second solo, blank projects, Cape Town
Collections
Johannesburg Art Gallery
Pierre Lombart Private collection/ SAFFCA, the Southern African Foundation For Contemporary Art
Jack Ginsberg collection of artists books
Warren Siebrits Private Collection