creative responses

I grew up in Kimberley, in a very creative home. My grandmother was a talented embroiderer and I loved to watch her as a child. I learned the art of beautiful, fine stitching from her. My father Rocky Mafafo is a gifted watercolourist who studied at the Rorkes’ Drift Art and Craft Centre. He encouraged me to develop my talent for painting, from an early age. This is why I started out as a painter and why painting continues to inform the aesthetic of my textile artworks. Our house was always buzzing with creative energy, and many wonderful artists, like Mama Helen Sebidi, the late Papa Dumisani Mabaso, the late Papa Peter Clarke, Mama Jill Trappler and Sam Nhlengethwa came to talk with my father and share ideas.  Growing up with this sense of creative community has made it easy to connect with other artists attached to Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, where I work.

When I create, I use textile, stitching, sewing and embroidery to express my innermost self. I choose to create with a talented group of predominantly female embroiderers who add their exquisite, fine stitching to my embroidery panels. Our studio has been a place of learning and growth. Together we have learned different embroidery stitches and then, as time has gone on, we have developed our own unique styles. Each of us brings our own stitching ‘voice’ to the tapestry and together we create a harmony of different perspectives, offering viewers of our works a complex, multi-layered experience: intrigue, empathy, playfulness, curiosity, discomfort.

The women I work with face challenges in life that would defeat the best of us. Earning a living is a constant struggle for single mothers with insecure housing, and it is important to me that their work offers empowerment in the form of financial remuneration. However, I am interested in the other ways in which creating art can be empowering to the women I work with. I see our creative process as one that interrupts our daily lives of service. When we create, we engage in work that gives us, that serves us, and that enriches our inner lives. As I empower my co-workers, I am in turn inspired by them as we share the stories of our lives and experiences. As a woman, I find that there is little space and time for us to practise self-discovery through creativity. This means we are unable to experience the fullness of life, or to explore our strength, purpose and meaning—our reason for being. Our work in the studio affords us space for these explorations. During the quiet, unhurried process of creating, we find ourselves in stillness. Or rather, the process of creating leads us into this stillness, a privileged place outside of the bustle and noise of daily life, and in this still space we find our true selves and our inner strength. The work allows us extended, enriching conversations with our own deepest selves.

The creative process is deeply therapeutic. While our hands work with the fabrics and threads, our minds are soothed by the beautiful colours and the repetitive, meditative nature of the stitching. The silence we work in allows the rippled surface of our consciousness to settle like a calm pool, and gives us the courage to dive down deeper into ourselves. For me, the quiet and stillness are essential to the process of creating because our minds are afforded space and time, away from our daily concerns, to engage our imagination, the source of our creativity. In the studio, we have a safe space to just be still. In this stillness, we feel held, interwoven. It brings self-assurance, joy and peace.

My greatest revelation through my years of practice has been that the creative process teaches us two very different, and often conflicting, human qualities: passion and patience. We need passion to experience life’s full potential, to be open, receptive and spontaneous, and we need patience and resilience to manage the trying times. As the work we do is finely detailed and time-consuming, it requires enormous patience and strength of will to see a large embroidery panel through to its end. We live in an absurdly fast-paced world where we are constantly bombarded with information and enticed by immediate gratification; the world we live in has taught us to expect to have our desires met instantaneously. Distracted by too many moving pieces, our minds barely have time to process all our experiences. With this kind of work, however, we learn to enjoy the process of creation itself, to be fulfilled by it so completely that the final product is simply the outcome of our creative process. We discover that we do not have to wait for completion of our work to experience joy and a sense of achievement but can experience these things always. Hopefully we are able to transmute this process into our whole lives, the lives we live beyond our work together in the studio.

Historically, textile art has only rarely been permitted into the sphere of ‘fine art’; it is more usually considered vocational, domestic and gendered. Through the centuries, this expression of creativity has typically been dismissed as ‘just women’s work,’ undeserving of a place in art history. As a multidisciplinary artist, and as a woman, I have a very different view. In fact, as more and more artists working across different media incorporate the ‘craft’ of embroidery into their work, the boundaries between ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’ are becoming increasingly blurred, disrupting the narrative of art history and making it more difficult for art critics to determine whose work is ‘acceptable’ in the fine art world. The conversation in an important one, and must continue.

The work of the Keiskamma Art Project resonates deeply with my practice as an artist because of its foundational premise: the potential for art to be a medium of healing, remembrance and holistic community care. I believe creativity is a gift from the ancestors, passed down from generation to generation, and therefore inseparable from the preservation of collective memory. The Keiskamma artists’ monumental artworks are the receptacle for communal memories and therefore a way of preserving the rich oral histories of their communities. I am awed by the Keiskamma artists’ practice of collective storytelling and healing, their coming together to foster support and growth in spaces the ‘world’ has forgotten. And this is why I am moved to amplify the artistic ‘voices’ of the Keiskamma Art Project; to help create a generous room where the voices of the most marginalised can be heard. There is much wisdom in these spaces.

I am inspired by women: by their creativity, courage and resilience. Like the stories of the talented embroiderers I work with, the stories of the Keiskamma women inspire me to create richly multifaceted depictions of womanhood. The inner and outer lives of women are at the centre of my practice. I love to re-imagine worlds where women are free to be more than over-burdened labourers; places where we can flourish into whole, complex beings. I am drawn to the women of the Keiskamma art collective because of their remarkable life stories and their resilience, their willingness to build towards the worlds I dream of, too.

This is why it is so important that artists like myself, my co-workers and the remarkable women of the Keiskamma Art Project remain true to our creative practice, regardless of the false dichotomies between ‘art’ and ‘craft.’ Our focus must remain on the act of creating and the authentic expression of self that this entails. Stitching our lived realities into art, who knows?  In time, with collective passion and patience, we may recreate the very fabric of society.