The Creation of Gallery Spaces
"I was interested in creating an immersive space where one can get lost in the details and textures of the room. I would like for people to spend time in the space, to have a deep emotional response to the exhibition. I aim to trigger memories, or hidden thoughts and feelings within the viewer. I'm interested in creating a space that has a sacred feeling to it - our lives are so wrapped in our busy schedules that we hardly take the time to sit quietly, to feel or to reflect."
The Collection of Reference Material
She describes having painted for hours ‘in empty buildings that felt like spiritual experiences, exploring holy chambers of neglected architecture…finding something so beautiful in what society disregards, and bringing to life that which people usually throw away or ignore.’ As a result of this approach, she has accumulated masses of reference material – phrases scrawled on the walls of abandoned buildings, illustrations under bridges, political slogans on structures in city centres and on roadsides.
These textures of the streets are incorporated into her studio work, which becomes a combination of her signature graphic style and marks left behind by people who were in those locations before her. Faith47 is deeply connected to these environments through her interactions with them – in her street work she is a commentator who, alongside others, draws attention to alternate realities on the streets. In her studio work she acts as a medium, bringing the voices of those commentators into a different context, for consumption by a different audience. She has also incorporated fragments of signage found on the streets into the work on this show. Many of them are words and symbols that a local of any South African city would recognise immediately – from warnings on residential gates, to pasted advertisements for herbals doctors and flyers for low-interest cash loans. In her appropriation of them alongside her own visual images, she unravels and complicates their meanings, delivering a real sense of the streets – ‘busy, busting, full of detail and signage and mismatched symbols and memories piled on top of each other.’
The installation of the exhibition adds to this sense of full-to-bursting bustle. One wall of the gallery is entirely filled with found wood, objects and artworks, closely packed together. The installation, although made up of many different pieces, appears as one work, jam-packed with complex detail. The chaos of the installation is at first overwhelming, much like busy city streets themselves, but it is by no means impenetrable. Once one has moved beyond the jolt of the initial commotion one is able to get lost in the details, finding overlapping stories and meanings in the juxtaposition of elements within the whole.
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