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LUCKY ME!

So this is what I get paid to do. I teach third year painting at the DUT. I was kind of dreading this year as I have 13 students which is a big class for third year.
I set three projects for the students - one focusing on site specific work, one working with found materials and one focusing on personal histories.
Look at what has been produced in the last three days.



This stencil was designed by Karla Nixon and was originally made to go behind a bizarre little white picket fence that is just outside the Interior Design Department, but I asked her to do one on my office door. We decided to add the roots, as the idea of "taking root" abounds in the studio this week.


This absolutely delightful "Pierneef Forest" has grown out of Joseph Greyling's studio, along the corridor outside my office and down past the Masters and Fourth Year studios to the Second Year studio. I love it as Pierneef was a prominent South African artist working around the same time that the art school was established.

The two works above are examples of the site specific project.



This lovely little work was made by Christopher Rajcoomar who was given a roll of blank price tags as his found object.


I found this delightful installation in Daniel Chapman's studio -  he was the lucky winner of the doillie as his found object.


Karla Nixon was given teeny tiny zip lock bags with which she is obsessively documenting the seemingly mundane world around her. These are all examples of artworks made with a found object as the conceptual starting point. 

The last of the three projects was inspired by an old assets register from the 1960's that I found when I was tidying the studio at the beginning of the year. It comes from the deep apartheid era, is all in Afrikaans and is an obsessive blue and white typed record of the transactions within some company or government department. I thought that the pages from this book it would form a beautiful 'canvas' onto which the students could record their own personal histories.   


Zama Mkhwanazi placed this great image of her family's cattle ontop of one of the pages - lovely cultural juxtaposition I think!


Claude Chandler and Nothando Sabela are working ontop of the pages with a complex series of family portraits.


I am exhausted, they are exhausted. Drinkies all round tonight methinks.

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