Doreen Southwood
Curtain
The first step in making this work was to print an image onto the surface of a sheet of low-grade stainless steel. I wanted to add colour to the work but also a subtle sense of texture or variation, so I played around by taking photographs of a mirror steamed up with heat and reflecting a piece of blue fabric. The image derived from this process was printed onto the metal as a backdrop for a floral-type pattern. The pattern was constructed using nuts and bolts – not bolted and screwed together but held onto the surface by the force of magnetic disks positioned behind the stainless steel sheet.
The pattern is reminiscent of the time and place of my childhood. It is taken from a piece of curtain fabric that is reflective of the ‘good taste’ of my grandmother. It is a feature of a type of interior decorating that seeks to transform the given context (in this case a farm in the Free State) into a space that is expensive and foreign. There’s a certain style that dictates the mood. The curtain is important here: it’s a divider, letting in light or keeping it out, creating a barrier between public and private worlds. In this work it has gone even further to become something of an iron curtain.
I have a lot of personal experience working with needle and thread, and with this work I found myself engaging with a similarly repetitive process, linked to fabric but in a very different way. Needlework is severely time consuming, but here the unseen magnetic fields holding the nuts and bolts in place made life even more difficult. Replicating the pattern of the fabric in a series of round and square objects was a gruelling task in that every nut and bolt took on a direction of its own. Somehow with great patience one could eventually guide each one into its place.
The tapestry is finally held together by a powerful field generated by the magnets. This field signifies the unseen world and the fragility of substance. What we cannot see or touch nonetheless has a huge effect on us.
Biography
Doreen Southwood was born in Cape Town in 1974 and has a BA Fine Art from the University of Stellenbosch. She was the overall winner of the first Brett Kebble Art Awards in 2003. She has held solo shows at the Klein Karoo Festival (2003) and Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town (2002 and 2001). Group exhibitions include Personal Affects: Power and poetics in contemporary South African art at the Museum for African Art in New York (2004) and the Dak’Art Biennial in Senegal (2004). She won the commission for a public sculpture in Tilburg, the Netherlands, in 2005 and will exhibit new paintings at Michael Stevenson in September 2005.
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