Veil 1954 and Carbon Dad 2017, two new works from South African artist Paul Emmanuel's most recent exhibition Substance of Shadows (2021), are examined as depicting rites of passage of memory and mourning, following the recent loss of both Emmanuel's parents. They are discussed in dialogue with the five untitled incised drawings from Emmanuel's 2008 Transitions exhibition, which addressed significant male rites of passage that were also liminal moments in male lives. In rites of passage, the citations, quotations and traces that form a subject's socially constituted body are undone and rearranged. Transitions (5), however, represents the quotidian liminality of commuting and while it is fruitfully interpreted as a metaphor for death, a deeper exploration of this particular rite of passage is held over, this article argues, until Veil 1954 and Carbon Dad 2017. These two works are therefore examined as a continuation of the works of Transitions. Crucially, however, it is proposed that Emmanuel's principal memory engagement in these two works is enacted materially, through his medium of obsolete carbon paper, rather than the exposed photographic paper of Transitions. The ways in which Emmanuel works with carbon paper allows a sensitive embodied exploration of aging and frailty to emerge.
Ilené Bothma knits with nylon stockings, stitches with human hair, and performs interventional actions with household furniture. Many of her canvases are vintage handkerchiefs and stockings. The body - specifically female and maternal bodies - is everywhere signalled, but seldom present. The artist also produces meticulously detailed, naturalistic paintings of her own and others' knitting, embroidery and crochet. Her delicate patterning with hair and her paintings of fabric soiled by bodily fluids provide a reflective tension within her work that speaks to how narratives of gendered roles and identities are written into representation. What the artist calls her 'deliberately bad knitting' is central here (Bothma 2020b). Bothma also creates a narrative for the work itself, encouraging possibilities for the interpretation of creative labour. As Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock (2000:3) put it, 'attention [is] given here to the work process by which an image is itself produced'. What emerges is a foregrounding of women's ambivalence.
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