MONDAY'S CHILD
2000
Pippa Skotnes
The turn of the new millennium has seen the completion of two new series of work. Both look less at external realities, more at the internal world of fears, anxieties, memories and dreams. The first, Ysterkop Dreams and Backfiring consists of bronze and metal figures and heads each of which reflects, with black humour, the atmosphere of dis-ease and uncertainly that pervades their gun and abuse ridden society. The faces are each masked with goggles or blindfolds as if they were bodiless beings taking part in some wild game of blind man's bluff. These unseeing eyes are not, however, blindly looking for something, each is gazing inward and then spilling , even spitting out ideas and fantasies as a collection of visible accretions. Gagged crocodiles, capped heads, firing pistols, small skulls on tongue like a sour comfits, crucified figures are part of the dark dreams of the four heads.
Monday's Child is a more contemplative series, closely reflected in their form of presentation as a collection of notes, photographs and objects, assembled in glass covered cases. There are six of them, suggesting that the child of the nursery rhyme born on Sunday - the perfect child, the child who turns out unscarred by the damaged world of his parents - has no place in this series of reflections.
Each case is made from metal, each surrounded by a frame of cast bronze toy trains. These, and their position as floor pieces, resonate with the experiences of the child who has his eyes on the ground, who sees small detail and who has the adult world at his back hovering above him and over him. The starting point for each of these cases is a series of violent incidents retained as troubling memories in the mind of the artist. The works recall these incidents through sketches, captions, notes and objects just as they recall the pervasive brutality of the late 50s and early 60s when the artist was growing up in the Mondeor hills outside of Johannesburg. But the series does more than this. While it plays with the objects of the child, the toy train, the baby's shoes, the plastic animals, it also contains these objects within the world of adult consciousness - the trains are also the trains that displaced people and separated families; the photographs also refer also to the wars in which young men died, the objects to the skirmishes and hostilities which the children's shoes, but not the children survived.
Monday's Child makes use of some of the same images and casts that appear in the other series of heads and figures so that it also becomes a reflection of the artist's own practice, and the images and impulses that have nurtured and formed his genre.
