Biography

A practising artist/ art historian/theorist, I taught in South Africa for twenty years, moved to the United Kingdom in 2000, and I teach in the School of the Arts, Loughborough University. My research focuses on colonial and postcolonial art, and women’s art practice. Publications include Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eyes (1995), Women and Art in South Africa (1996), Between Union and Liberation. Women Artists in South Africa 1910-1994, (2005, co-edited with Brenda Schmahmann), and ‘Here, there and in-between: South African women and the diasporic condition’ in Women, the arts and globalisation. Eccentric experience (Meskimmon and Rowe, 2013).

Academic Paper

Cross-Cultural Journeys between Africa and the West via Print
South African apartheid inhibited cross-cultural contact, imposed western values, and delivered inferior education to the majority of the population, denying black South Africans opportunities to study art at state schools and universities.  Twentieth-century South African art was dominated by white artists, who learnt western pictorial and sculptural conventions, and adopted subject matter which conformed to genres established by European academies. Black South Africans, who had no tradition of creating portable paintings or large scale sculpture, were deemed to produce craft or material culture, not ‘art’. This paper focuses on cross-cultural journeys by black and white artists who worked at the Caversham Press in KwaZulu-Natal during the late apartheid and post-apartheid eras. I suggest that cultural journeys are literal, metaphorical, and conceptual and to exemplify this premise I analyse and discuss prints by William Kentridge (b. 1955) and Sthembiso Sebisi (1976-2006), demonstrating how they explore African and Western heritage and traditions, and processes of acculturation. Drawing, understood in the western sense as visual thinking, informs Kentridge’s printmaking processes and techniques. I argue that this enables him to conceptualise provisional, postmodern meanings, but I locate his subject matter in a confluence of wide-ranging western intellectualism and South African socio-political experiences. Contrasting Kentridge with Sebisi, I note the centrality of Zulu life and culture, and the role of Christianity and indigenous belief systems to Sebisi, but explain his use of western naturalism as the descriptive vehicle for his narratives about rural Zulu life. Both artists demonstrate the influence of cross-cultural contact and the assimilation of aspects of different South African and western cultures within one another. In the prints of Kentridge and Sebisi, I discern differences in access to knowledge and different decisions about visual vocabularies as communicative tools, but a similar commitment to narratives expressed through print media.