In her garden studio, Kate Gottgens assembles works for her exhibition ‘Malice Aforethought’, held at SMAC in 2013. Works from this exhibition were selected to feature in Kurt Beers’s prestigious new book, 100 Painters of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson, 2014).
Painter Kate Gottgens’s house was once the gamekeeper’s cottage on Moddergat farm, on the road that heads over the hill from Hout Bay to Constantia Nek in Cape Town. When she and her husband Clive bought it, they were told it was built in the 1870s or 1880s. It’s actually a compound in which different buildings house different rooms. Surrounded by oaks and in a thicket of garden arranged in terraces down the mountainside at the back of Silvermine, Kate’s studio is just across the garden from the house.
‘I need to be in my studio for at least six hours a day. Here, I’m in and out of my studio all day and into the evening so I can work right up until I eat supper and then go back out again. It’s a fantastic luxury. The solitude can be a downside. I did love the lion’s den atmosphere of the studio I once shared with others, including Paul Edmunds and Sue Williamson, because working among other artists there’s a sense of competition. I think I would struggle with that now. Here I’m happy with that need to not measure myself against others but to connect with myself instead. I like that here, quietly and on my own, I can plumb the depths and get into my work without being confused when I see a fellow artist making something and then sort of thinking well, why am I not doing that? I don’t want that sort of distraction.
‘I love the illusion here that I’m in the forest. I can almost believe it when I look outside and I can see just about every colour green, the layers of trees and the rocky mountain behind. But there’s something almost disquieting about living here, a feeling of dread I think I’m trying to get into my work. There’s peace and calm, but there’s a sense of being in the wilds here. We had this cataclysmic flood not long ago. We’ve had a snake, we’ve had an otter, and we have the cats bringing in frogs and shrews. It’s dark at night. It’s a very big sky of stars. If you sit outside in the day, you see big buzzards flying overhead. So there is a feeling of not being in Cape Town, not been in something too little and boxy in the suburbs.’
A brilliant painter with her own unique style, Gottgens’s process of making art is the opposite of those artists who require chaos, panic and angst in order to work. She produces her best work in a very contemplative, serene space. She incorporates diverse media into her artworks: acrylic and oil paint, ink, oxides, chalks and ash to produce a subtle and moody palette that works in washes, blurs and discolouration to set the tone for displaced suburban scenes. Older, sunnier but oblivious memories of South Africa in the 1970s are revisited in some of her best-known pieces, ‘idyllic’ pool-side scenes and family gatherings that are now seen through a glass darkly with colour washed and shadowings that convey dread and uncertainty. A teenage girl stands beside a vintage Citroën, there’s an old Kombi with a door thrown open, a couple sit knee to knee with smouldering cigarettes between their fingers; in outdoor scenes, figures move into a fog, the landscape tilts and turns grey. Sunny South Africa destroyed by hindsight.
‘Old houses like this one have a provenance. They’re layered so there’s a patina that enriches it. It has a story. Much of my work deals with memories, but never nostalgically. I construct my own memories: occasionally I work with my Instamatic so the photographs it takes look like 1960s photographs. And the pictures might be of furniture in the yard outside Mills auctioneers, say, taken while the sun was shining on it in a certain way. This is not nostalgia. I’m not even romancing the past. I’m interrogating it as an inquisitor would. My latest body of work interrogates colonialism. People like me, born in the 1950s and 1960s, were born into colonialism and apartheid. Look through your own photographs of you as a child sitting innocently on the beach with your nanny. Well, that nanny shouldn’t have been on the beach, or swimming. That’s in our history and we can’t get away from it.’
Being firmly grounded in the present gives Kate what she needs to look back at the Eden that never was. There’s the calm, structured home, the peacefulness of family life, alongside persisting ambivalence and an uneasiness found in her work rather than the surroundings. Living on the edge of suburbia works for her.
‘I’m not accountable to anyone, I don’t have to get up and go to work. My time is my own. There is a sense of being free, even though I grapple with freedom in the content of my work.’
The sitting room is a curated space housing furniture assembled from salerooms and from Kate’s husband Clive’s own workshop, where he builds film sets. On the right Interior from the ‘Malice Aforethought’ exhibition and over the fireplace one of Simon Stone’s sinker paintings. The walls’ wasabi mustard colour and the aubergine of the sofas is a careful colour combination orchestrated by Kate.
‘I love brakdak houses.’ Here on her stoep, dappled light filters through the latte of the rietdak, highlighting and obscuring works by Barend de Wet, Brett Murray and Harry Kentratos hanging on the wall.
Kate displays some of her collection of Globe and Linnware ceramics on a mid-century modern side table in the hall. On the wall above, Clive’s photograph of the Swartberg alongside a vintage black-and-white photograph from a hoard of glass negatives of vernacular Cape scenes retrieved from a local saleroom.
In the garden, the corrugated iron-clad studio faces north across the trees to Orange Kloof. On the edge of the forest, ‘It’s a quiet, magical place.’
Boy with Dachshund (2013).
A view into the kitchen from the dining room. Clive made the rosewood table in the foreground, while the red ceramic candlesticks are Kate’s work. Just as colour is an important part of her work, so it is in her house: ‘My colour sense is pretty nuanced.’