bronze, enamel and fabric

Artwork date: 2007
Edition: from an edition of 5 + 3AP
Exhibited: Spier, Stellenbosch, 'Spier Contemporary 2007', December 2007 to December 2008.
Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, 'ZA: Giovane Arte dal Sudafrica', 2 February to 4 March 2008.
Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 'Summer 2007/8', 18 November 2007 to 12 January 2008.
Literature: Pather, J. (ed). (2007). 'Spier Contemporary 2007'. Cape Town: Africa Centre, another example from this edition illustrated in colour on pp.192 and 193.
Fusi, L. (2008). 'ZA: Giovane Arte dal Sudafrica. Milan: Silvana Editoriale', another example from this edition illustrated in colour on pp.152, 154, 155 and 186.

(4)

hieght: 60 cm each approximately

Provenance:

Private collection, Cape Town.

Acquired directly from the artist.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Doreen Southwood’s career has been a balancing act of sorts. One of few South African creatives to successfully straddle the worlds of art and design, she has run her own clothing label, and was the brains behind fashion boutique MeMeMe ­– all while maintaining a public profile as a mixed-media artist, exhibiting from New York to Dakar.

Perhaps it makes sense that balance is a recurring theme in Southwood’s work, an exercise in equipoise between solid and liquid, surface and depth, the mundane and the fantastical. In her sculpture The Swimmer (2003), which won the artist the first Brett Kebble Art Award, a woman hesitates at the edge of a diving board. Her lower back has been perforated by a plughole – should she jump she would sink, so she teeters on the brink in exquisite anticipation of the inevitable.

The Dancer is also a study in balance, though of a more complex kind. In the specialised argot of dance, the word ‘ballon’ describes the illusion of perfect suspension. Done right, it seems a dancer will never fall to earth, caught in motion so light and effortless it makes time elastic. Southwood’s dancer, however, doesn’t stop at a ballon: she hovers above an abyss and time reconfigures around her. The artist explains, “Of importance for me was to display a liquid state, a place where time loses its established value”.[1] Each pose freezes the figure in an isolated instant. Collectively, these moments encourage the viewer to attend to all the details of movement that would otherwise escape us: the brush of fabric against the body, the play between weight and weightlessness, the fullness of an indrawn breath. But above all, The Dancer reveals the gradual accumulation of time as, to steal Derrida’s phrase, “a procession of presences”.[2]

^{[1] Southwood, D in Stevenson, M. (2007). Doreen Southwood: The Dancer.. [online]. Available: https://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/southwood/dancer3.htm}

^{[2] Derrida, J. (1972). Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.}

^COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Ellerman House, Cape Town; Sasol Art Collection Johannesburg; Spier Art Collection, Stellenbosch and the Standard Bank Corporate Collection, Johannesburg.