Dear friends,

A group of South-African Artists from conceptual Art, Design and Craft disciplines were invited to exhibit together. The exhibition explores instances where the boundaries between art,  design and craft flow into one another. It focuses on artists who reinvent traditional techniques of “crafts” like embroidery, bead-work, weaving, carpentry and paper cutting. It also explores the meaning and importance of craftsmanship in contemporary art practices.

 so…..

I decided to submit ‘self-/portraits’ for this exhibition since portraiture is a very old art form and was probably pioneered by the Egyptians and the Greeks, but in the Middle-ages Self-portraiture was a starting point because it was an age preoccupied by personal salvation and self-scrutiny.

Today self-portraits flood the internet and children in school are required to make them.

I am using a traditional craft technique= embroidery, in conjunction with the age old art-form of portraits onto an unconventional material =rubber.

Upon closer inspection, you will also notice that there is a difference in the way the “rubber canvas” (so to speak) of all 3 portraits were prepared:

In the piece titled: “Safe”

the rubber canvas consists of tiny hexagon rubber shapes which were stitched together by hand to form the basis of this work.

In the piece above “I’ll be watching you”  you’ll notice that once piece of a big tractor inner tube were used;

and in the piece below “Don’t make waves”, rubber squares were stitched together with an industrial sewing machine to form the ‘rubber-canvas’

Anyway, so if you are in the Bloemfontein area, feel free to pop in at the Flux group exhibition xxx