To tell our stories is an offering of love, a chance to meet and connect and most of all to share. To acknowledge, honour, celebrate and bask in womxn’s month, Eclectica Contemporary hosts a womxn’s group show in our womxn-run gallery.

Entangling and intertwining the complexities and simplicities of identity, environments are created and explored. Recognising power and representation, this exhibition hopes to welcome conversation, warmth, community and interaction through the work, the artists, the space and the context of history and present time, as we share and create our stories together.

AIMEE LINDEQUE

Aimee Lindeque’s art can be concisely summarised as intricate and imaginative works created in an eclectic style. She describes her creative process as a form of intuitive auto-pilot wherein she allows images, textures and ideas from her imagination and subconscious to flow into works which have a dense doodle-like quality. Her work is partly inspired by the onslaught of imagery individuals experience in the information age.

In 2017 she graduated from the UCT Michaelis School of Fine Art with a major in sculpture. Aimee is currently producing and exhibiting work in watercolour and ink. Their colour arrangement and focus on line detail is inspired by comic book artists such as Moebius. Aesthetically, her work experiments with the visual effects of detail and how cluttered imagery can create different interpretations depending on how far the viewer is from the artwork.

Georgia Lane

Georgia Lane first developed her resourceful and innovative approach to painting while living in Greece with limited access to resources. Her background in graphic design and marketing, as well as her love for art as she was growing up lay very firm foundations for her growth into the painter we know and love today. Having exhibited and been represented by prestigious galleries, Georgia Lane has presented solo bodies of work and been featured at the Cape Town Art Fair. Her work has been collected by international art lovers and is housed in New York, London, Chicago, Philadelphia, Sydney, Dubai, Stockholm, Cape Town and Johannesburg. She works from memory and as such, her paintings become a meditative process in which she participates with subconscious aspects striving foremost for honesty and simplicity of thought.

Hanna Noor Mahomed

Hanna Noor Mahomed is a student currently in her final year of a Bachelor of Arts in Contemporary Art at Cape Town Creative Academy.

“I am fascinated with the relationship between material: particularly observing the dichotomies between elements, often constructing a narrative in and of themselves. Through a repertoire of intuitive installation and experimental play, art-practice for me acts as a conduit for catharsis: often heavily based on my surrounding circumstances. Using and referring to powdered-spice as a reanimated material morphs into a medium to highlight a subjective experience; situated within the context of my own history, reality and lived experience.”

Romi Flowers

Romi Flowers (Born Romi Geldenhuys in 1992) is a self-taught contemporary multimedia, figurative and abstract painter from Cape Town. Growing up, Flowers always had a natural affinity for the arts, from drama, and music, to several various forms of dance, and art mediums. In 2008, she began taking art classes at the formally known art school, Frank Joubert and was placed in the drawing class. After graduating high school in 2010, Flowers went on to study Fashion Design At CPUT, Cape Town, where she received her diploma in 2015.

In 2017 she adopted the pseudonym, Romi Flowers, as her artistic channel, from Ramona Flowers, a character in her favourite graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim. She connected with the characters ideals and way of thinking, as well as having certain identical physical aspects such as their hair.

Romi Flowers expresses her double edged sword view of reality through a brightly contrasted genre of portraiture, where she deals with the concepts of social issues that are troubling our young. Flowers uses her art as a way to communicate those social issues deemed difficult to speak about (like beauty stereotypes, abuse, rape, gender, and mental health awareness) by applying a filter of flowers and playful colour combinations.

‘’You don’t have to be a genius to be an artist or to understand it or to love it, but an artist can be a genius. The answer to Art lies in the art itself. You just have open your heart, and close your ‘eyes’. Art is a matter of opinion, and every individual has their own.  I can’t give you All the answers, there are somethings words have no value explaining what imagery can entice. Tell me how you see it.” – R.F.

Kirstin Warries

My name isn’t K-Juizy
It’s actually Kirstin Warries
I’m from Bellville South
Where the mense buy kwaai takkies
And they yak branded gap
Even all the small laaities.
Mense skit and dance to Youngsta and Kendrick
See, Hip-Hop is a style that I see everyday.
I also hear it in the streets
From houses all the way from my house
2 blocks from the source of music.
If it’s not loud bra you ain’t doing it properly.
But I ain’t hear female rappers in my city
Patty Monroe, Dope Saint Jude,
Are foreign to the South.
These Women from the city want to make it in the industry
But brasse wys them sousies,
Because they all have titties.
Slavery’s still here in a form not so clear;
Women bounded by stereotypes and privileges of men.
We all want a chance to do what we feel.
There’s too many injustices
that need to be confronted right here.
I make art about women who deserve chances that are fair.
If you don’t like my art
Just leave it right there.

Clare Patrick

Clare Patrick was born and raised in Cape Town. Currently living, working and studying in Brighton, she is completing an MA in Photography: History, Theory and Practice at the University of Sussex. She graduated with Distinction for her BA/FA (hons) at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Her practice sits at intersections and across mediums, interested in the layering of disciplines and tools, from photography studios to stages and theatres to green houses and florist fridges. Clare has exhibited in various exhibitions in Cape Town and has worked in the arts industry as a curator, writer and workshop facilitator for the past 5 years.

Luami Calitz

Luami Calitz graduated with a BA Fine Art from Stellenbosch University in 2012. She now lives and works in Cape Town, working in a shared artist studio space.

Working across the mediums of drawing, textile and illustration, Luami’s work are whimsical, playful and mythical. They offer a window into a similar but more brightly coloured reality of certain instances. Her work is inspired by Science Fiction, medieval art and sartorial Instagram accounts. Often narrating tongue- in-cheek events through a sarcastic and cynical lens, Luami’s creations herald the notion of Strong Womxn while also allowing for an appreciation of those who are still trying to figure it all out.

Nava Derakhshani

Nava Derakhshani is a multimedia artist, activist and story worker whose journey follows the earth. She has a background in architecture which developed her artistic and design skills. It grounded her thinking in post colonial theory and emphasised the layered social and environmental impacts of art and design. Her Master’s in Sustainable Development took her to rural Ethiopia where she sought timid narratives of soil and resilience. This narrative based approach has been central to her work, using storytelling to understand and communicate the nuances of peoples’ lived experiences in the development and NGO field. From soil back to earth, She is revisiting her love for clay and has been taking classes and producing bodies of work at TAB Ceramic Studio in Cape Town since 2015.

“I am currently developing an artistic series of stylised sculptures in clay, exploring themes of identity and non-binary gender and sexuality. My current exploration with clay sees the merging of colours together and alongside one another, which is a new area of exploration in the field. The couples I am building are built from different colours of clay, to represent different tonalities of skin and ethnicity. For me, this is a project of representation, showing love in all the forms which media often neglects.“

Novisha Steyn

Novisha Steyn was born in Mauritius in 1993 and upon completing her high school years she moved to the city of Cape Town where she joined City Varsity in 2013 to study Motion Picture Make-up because of her interest in the human form.

The following year she moved to the Eastern Cape to pursue Fine Arts at Rhodes University, where she further consolidated ideas that centred around the discourse of the manipulation of the human body through artworks. Notions of the body grew stronger as protests arose around campus and students used their bodies as an element of disruption as a means to oppose social and political injustices.

In her collection of artworks, Novisha produces unfinished oil on canvas paintings, depicting young women in a state of vulnerability and frustration towards their own bodies. This counters the generally depicted picture-perfect images constantly uploaded and posted on social media of beautiful young women – that fit within Western beauty standards whilst being captured in an idealistic scenery. Thus, by taking the narrative away from a typically male constructed framework, Novisha challenges the norms of how women are narrated within social platforms.

Morgan Kunhardt

Morgan Kunhardt is an emerging South African artist who is currently residing in the Midlands – KwaZulu-Natal. She was born in 1994 and grew up on a small farm that rested beneath the foothills of the Southern

Drakensberg. Morgan Kunhardt studied Fine Art at Michaelis School of Fine Art, in Cape Town, completing her degree in Photography in 2017. She first exhibited outside Michaelis in 2017 in a group show called By Way of Hand, which took place at Orms Cape Town school of Photography. Then exhibiting at Eclectica Contemporary in a show titled: Stop Stop Click: a group show, followed by an exhibition titled New Dawn at Eclectica Design and Art. Morgan Kunhardt works in a variety of alternative photographic mediums; her most recent body of work demonstrates her interest in collage. Her work has included themes such as impermanence, memory, heritage and her relationship to her twin sister.

Duduza Mchunu

Duduza Mchunu was born in 1995 and grew up in Johannesburg. In 2014 Duduza moved to Cape Town to begin her studies. Having majored in printmaking from UCT s Michaelis School of Fine Art, Duduza Mchunu creates work that seeks to challenge the status quo and speak for marginalised bodies. Although her major was in printmaking, Duduza creates work across various platforms and mediums often utilizing digital media as a form of immediate expression.

This work was created based off of personal experience with love. It made the idea of experience and feeling as something subjective rather than objective which is the way one thinks love is shared and seen universally. It plays on the many ideas one experiences when love is happening through memory, perception, permanence,image and emotion. By the use of photo transfer it takes and fades away from the reality of love itself warping it and creating a messy, lost, confusing and relative experience. We speak of truth being relative, how everybody has their own idea of what is taking place. But in the case of this work and personal experience something such as love which is a person at their most open and vulnerable with another believing they are one experiencing the same emotion when in fact what is attempted to be communicated within this work is that Love is relative.

Kirsten Arendse

Since 2015, Michaelis alumni Kirsten Arendse has been fascinated by the concept of “non-beauty” and the ways in which western beauty standards have dictated women. Much of her artistic practice has involved the use of hair and its connotations to societal beauty, as it is one of many physical aspects of the body that many feel like they have to try and control, condition and maintain.

As a young coloured woman, Arendse has struggled with the idea of control, constantly trying to manipulate her hair to what she had been taught to be “beautiful”, until finally allowing her hair to be as it was intended to be. In some aspects of her culture, curly hair is deemed or has been deemed as undesirable. She explains that if you had curly hair in this way you were therefore labelled a “kroeskop” or a “bossiekop”. These are two of many terms that have negatively governed the appearance of non-European individuals for many years in efforts to other, segregate and demean.

For this exhibition, Arendse has taken this same concept and grappled with it in relation to methods of conditioning and control in efforts to try and challenge or allude to the hidden systems many communities of colour are still dictated by. She etching on perspex, to speak to ideas of manipulation and synthetic culture.

Faatimah Mohamed-Luke

Faatimah Mohamed-Luke is a 37 year old artist and designer who lives in Cape Town- with her 2 cats, the husband and kid. In 2003, she graduated from Cape Technikon with ND: Fashion and also did a year of design encompassing Graphic, Interior, Industrial, Textile and Jewellery design disciplines. Faatimah is a founding partner of SA designer brand adam&eve. Three years ago, she resigned from fashion to focus on Art and Interior design. Her current focus is creating large-scale wall art made of plastic building blocks. She has had great success exhibiting at galleries and art fairs within South Africa and abroad.

“While on holiday in Morocco, 5 years ago, I fell in love with ornate, intricate patterns. It was everywhere, every surface was painstakingly adorned to perfection. I loved how much pride the locals took in creating such beauty, it spoke to different parts of my heritage; African and Arab. It was the first time I had witnessed parts of my heritage living together so gracefully. This is where I discovered the art of Tessellation i.e. a highly symmetric, edge-to-edge tiling using a simple porcelain shape. My hope is to highlight and recreate the art form of tessellation in a modern way using plastic building blocks. My favourite thing about about this medium is it being non-traditional. It allows for conversations about what art is, and what it could be. This allows for a playfulness and accessibility within the artwork and also within the art-world. It is something that is relatable to a broader audience. The works create a feeling of nostalgia and relevance, and is appreciated by all ages and backgrounds.

Asuka Nirasawa
Cell Division, 952 Cells
2018
fabric, acrylic medium, glitter, pencil on canvas
150 x 200 cm
SOLD