bronze, steel, enamel paint and fabric

Artwork date: 1997
Signature details: each signed with the artist's initials and numbered 02/05
Exhibited: Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Summer 2007/8, 18 November 2007 – 12 January 2008. Spier, Stellenbosch, Spier Contemporary 2007, December 2007 – December 2008. Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, ZA: Giovane Arte dal Sudafrica, 2 February – 4 March 2008.
Literature: Pather, J. ed. (2007). Spier Contemporary 2007. Cape Town: Africa Centre, p.192, another example from this edition illustrated in colour on pp.192 and 193. Fusi, L. (2008). ZA: Giovane Arte dal Sudafrica. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, p.161, another example from this edition illustrated in colour on pp.152, 154, 155 and 186.

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approximately: 70 x 45 x 50 cm each; installation dimensions variable

Notes:

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’s been the brains behind fashion boutique Mememe since 2001 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. With her feet barely touching the metal bar beneath her, Southwood’s dancer doesn’t stop at a ballon: she hovers above the 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” (2007).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” (1972).

Anna Stielau

Sources:

Derrida, J. 1972. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Southwood, D in Stevenson, M. 2007. The Dancer.