Margins

The duality between calm and chaos is a defining characteristic of Aimee Lindeque’s work. She is interested in the contrast between the rural and urban landscape, between old and modern as well as the disparities one experiences in an attempt to navigate between these spaces. Lindeque explores the overwhelming onslaught of sensory information by using fragments from her everyday experience to create strange, often disjointed, visual narratives. Her work is a detail-drenched kaleidoscope of surreal imagery which encourages viewers to look again, meditate and smile. It’s Hieronymous Bosch meets where’s Wally. 

Lindeque was born on a farm in rural Mpumalanga, South Africa. The unique beauty of the lowveld’s vegetation and landscape is a constant influence in her work and she frequently travels home for inspiration. She completed her BA(FA) (2017) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and currently lives and works in Cape Town.

Simultaneously incongruous and familiar, Alet Swarts’ paintings are filled with metaphorical images, textures and patterns. These are sometimes presented out of context, to suggest ambiguity and create deliberate juxtaposition. Intricate compositions feature birds, flowers and networks of botanical patterns alongside landscapes which explore depth-of field through delicate water droplets. They are painted in great detail, with meditative precision and intensity, as a contradiction to the lightness and fleetingness of the moments they represent. 

Swarts is a full time Pretoria based visual artist and she has participated in numerous local exhibitions. 

Chloë Jayne’s artistic practice endeavours to centralise intersectional feminism, while acknowledging her white matriarchal upbringing. She aims to facilitate conversation and learning through the production of minimal, suggestive photographic prints and collage works. Through making, she seeks to represent what gets overlooked, both within the physical realm as well as through assumed social constructs.

Jayne recently completed her BA(FA) (2019) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Her practice combines collage, printed matter and installation. 

Emma Blencowe’s practice functions as a celebration, a statement and a contradiction that explores what it means to exist as a fat womxn in a society that overtly rejects fatness. Blencowe uses food colouring to construct painterly figurative works featuring large, fleshy bodies that ooze out of the edges of their frames or are contained but ripped, scarred and imperfect like flesh. Her practice challenges the contradictions which simultaneously fetishize, condemn, pity, judge and mock fat womxn and bodies which have been ‘othered’. In this series her figures are unfixed, instead they are floating, flying or falling and therefore exist in a kind of limbo-state. 

Blencowe recently completed her BA(FA) (2019) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art snd she lives and works in Cape Town. She is currently experimenting with digital forms of art alongside her food colouring paintings. 

Originally from Belleville South, Warries completed her BA(FA) (2017) at Stellenbosch University. Alongside Christina Fortune, she is the co-curator of Eclectica Contemporary’s annual ‘KWAAI’ exhibition now in its third year. Together they have recently co-founded the initiative Siesa, which centres artistic expression and celebration through curated online events. 

The process of altering or intervening to create work is a significant quality of Nina Holmes’ practice. She likens this process-based approach to “surrealist automatism”, while also allowing for the inevitable influence of found images, photographs and the borrowing of techniques and inspirations from other paintings. Working loosely and around expectations Holme’s paintings are never limited to canvas and oil. Instead they push the formal, rigid canon of painting. She enjoys working on multiple paintings, with work spread out across her studio in Woodstock. The working process is occasionally accompanied by a grand symphonic soundtrack and sometimes with silence. There is careful thinking and intense working through various influences and concepts.

Holmes is a Cape Town-based artist who completed her PgDip (2017) with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. She has had two solo exhibitions with Eclectica Contemporary and was featured in the 2020 Investec Cape Town Art Fair solo section.

Sue Greeff’s artistic practice looks at the crossover between biology, psychology and art. Her fascination with the body and mind stems from her experiences as a midwife, psychiatric nurse and mother. She carefully considers her mediums to communicate sexuality, reproduction and emotional states using inks on paper, oil on canvas, ink on latex as well as other experimental mediums. Greeff’s desire is that her artworks will stimulate discussions around the concepts she presents without being didactic. In the wildflower series the artist is looking at the inner feminine and uses the wildflower motif as a symbol of the intuitive feminine. The anima (feminine side) and the animus (the masculine side) of our psyches when in balance help us to embrace challenges, live with vitality and to self nurture. And most importantly, at this time in our history, to live with our hearts open to hope.

She completed her BA(FA) (2015) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and currently lives and works in Cape Town. Greeff has participated in a number of solo and group shows and her work is held in private collections locally and internationally.

Yvette Hess’s practice is deeply rooted in the personal. When the artist was hospitalised after a manic depressive episode her therapist encouraged her to explore creative outputs to create a space and identity for herself. What was originally prescribed as a form of therapy eventually evolved into a creative practice which has since allowed Hess to own her voice and allowed her to “speak in colour and bold strokes […]louder than I’ve ever […] given myself the chance to”. 

Hess (1986) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Mosselbay. She was born in the Western Cape, but her upbringing in the Free State during the 1990’s influenced much of her identity, in navigating being an “other”, a young coloured girl in a then racially charged environment. Her story was been broadcast on multiple platforms and she documents her experiences on various blogs and social media channels.  Hess has participated in multiple local exhibitions as well as a solo show.