Search: South African Artists Books


Basic |  Guided |  Advanced |  Tips


    Full Details


Resist Technique

Item date(s): 2017

Belinda Blignaut


Medium: Stoneware; bubblegum; lipstick; nail polish
Pages: unpaged
Size: 190mm
Edition: Unique


Place publication: Cape Town
Publisher: Artists Book
Exhibition 2017

Additional notes:
Bound with cord threaded through holes in various forms of ceramic 'pages'. There are twelve ceramic pages and one made of card containing a CD with a musical score.

The only text on the piece are on various pages: vulnerability, unprocessed, earth skin, unknown.

Reference note:
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.

12 pages individually made, each containing a glaze resist technique, a simple non-aesthetic or a ceramic experiment (broken rule). Each slab has holes to facilitate the binding.

Exhibition notes:
‘Booknesses: Contemporary South African Artist's Books’.

FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg.

Curated by David Paton and Eugene Hon.

24 March - 5 May 2017



Ref: GB/15155











© Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts (JGCBA). All rights reserved.