The entrance to Brett and Sanell’s 250-year-old house: the walls are slate and the ceiling is insulated with clay placed above the ceiling boards. The previous owner, an Italian stonemason, installed the marble inlay floor. The large painting on the left is Sanell’s Face of the Beguiled (2001), the small carved wooden sculpture is by Egon Tania, and the small wooden chair on the right was bought at a student exhibition at Michaelis School of Fine Art.
Home for husband and wife Brett Murray and Sanell Aggenbach and their two children is a rambling old house in Woodstock, Cape Town that lends itself perfectly well to family living.
In the 1980s, Brett and Barend de Wet, art students at the time, heard about the Italian sculptor living in this old property and went to visit him. He had been a prisoner of war during World War II but had stayed on after it was over. This was his studio as well as his home; the evidence survives everywhere. From the outside it looks like a narrow Victorian semi, but step inside and it becomes apparent just how ancient it is (c.1750) and how big. And, strangely for Woodstock, there’s a massive, almost Mediterranean garden at the back with pomegranates, olives and a vineyard. The property is one of those gems in a popular neighbourhood that’s managed to remain a secret.
Neither Sanell nor Brett work from home, preferring instead their respective studios in other parts of the city. Sanell, using painting, printmaking and sculpture, describes her work, found in numerous private and public collections, in terms of satirical cultural exorcisms. ‘I don’t limit myself,’ she said in the Mail & Guardian. ‘I also make sculptures, I play with different mediums.’ This, in combination with typically feminine crafts, like sewing and tapestry, ensures her style of making art is unique. Her palette has been described as ‘corroded blues and greens’ shading female anatomies, sullen portraits and tattooed torsos. Where does white leisure and suburbia meet our collective historical nightmare?
Brett is perhaps South Africa’s most controversial artist of the last decade, with his works All Hail to the Thief and The Spear (targeting President Jacob Zuma as a symbol of corrupt greed and hypocrisy) attracting both outrage and admiration at home and abroad. He himself locates his work in the context of protest or resistance art as satire.
Sanell Originally it was just the two of us. So it took a long time for us to grow into this huge house, to use the entire space. But that’s why you have children. To fill the rooms and create memories, and to wipe your mouth when you’re 80 years old after you’ve had soup.
Sanell Brett came with Barend one day to see the commission the Italian sculptor living here was doing for Dr Chris Barnard. They met this crazy, tiny old man; Brett says he had huge stonemason’s hands and arms like Popeye. They went into the garden and he showed them all kinds of stone and marble sculptures. They got hideously drunk together and that’s when Brett fell in love not only with that old Italian and his sculptures and the craziness, but the house too. In 2005, we got word that the old man had died. The new owner’s wife didn’t want to live in Woodstock, so he offered the house to Brett because everyone told him Brett was keen to have it. When we arrived it was boarded up in the front, with drug addicts in one part, a Rwandan family at the back and an interior decorator in what’s now my office. Actually when we moved in, the Rwandan family stayed put in the cottage at the back and we all shared the property for a while. They joked that this was the Hotel Rwanda because it was the time that movie came out.
Brett I was intrigued by the volume of this property and attracted to its sense of history, even though it was quite derelict then. This house has soul. And I like where I live to be integrated in terms of colour and class and culture, and living in Woodstock is an absolute mix of all those things, more so now that xenophobia in the townships has chased out people coming from the Congo and Nigeria. And so you’ve got all these carpentry shops here and if you walk around the area on Saturdays and Sundays you hear music from the Nigerian happy-clappy churches and all kinds of other sounds. My gallery is here, the framers, the lumber place – and of course the carpenters.
Brett At the moment we’re just feeling our way as we go along. And I suppose we will add another creative layer to it.
Sanell When we moved in we started cleaning. Some of the rooms were ox-blood or turquoise. It must have been quite a flamboyant residence with an interesting story to tell. Much of my work has to do with memories and ghosts. I’m quite receptive to the energy of a place; when we arrived, I found a calming, peaceful energy here.
Sanell A lot of my work has to do with nostalgia, yes. Nostalgia and narratives make new stories. My work explores memories and narrative, the intersection of historical narrative and personal narrative and the search for identity. It has to do with my own identity as an Afrikaner, at odds with the old Afrikaner persona but not quite fitting in with the alternative rock bands like Fokofpolisiekar. I’m sort of stuck in a schism between the two. I associate with that guilt for the past. Look at The Collective, where these beautiful black sheep that I sewed are staring unquestioningly at tapestries I made based on Pierneef landscapes. I wouldn’t say it was melancholic, my work, because there’s a quiet humour in it. Look at Lemmings, for Spier, where I used those old iconic metal bucket chairs that you used to find in Karoo gardens, you know, the kind that you painted ‘eau de nil’ after you’d painted your gutters, and you had some paint left over so you painted the chairs too. I welded on these long legs so that they could ‘walk away’. That was all about the 1980s illusion of a safe suburbia.
Sanell We are big nesting people. We love cooking and we love entertaining. Most of our friends have kids so it’s quite chaotic here over weekends when we’ve got two- and three-year-olds running ‘kaalgat’ through the house and through sprinklers, and we’re trying to braai.
Brett With two small children, we’re kind of homebodies. We see a movie once every six months, maybe, if we’re lucky.
Sanell Good! I grew up in Worcester so the Klein Karoo is absolutely in my blood. I can’t see myself living in Knysna or the Highveld. That’s definitely not me. This is me.
Brett We have fantasies about having a place in the Karoo with a wraparound stoep. This is kind of that house. It’s just that it happens to be in the middle of the city.
Brett No I don’t think so, although I suppose just sitting out there on the swing under the olive trees and thinking is enough. I do enjoy living in an environment created by another creative person.
Sanell And look at your work: there’s a lot of it that’s craft-based, your welding, your moulding. He’s very hands-on and I think that helps him to appreciate the details of this house, like the sandstone fireplace made by the Italian.
Sanell Absolutely. It’s an extension of yourself, isn’t it?
Sanell Well, everyone is different, and I can’t speak for architects or writers. But because our whole sensibility is for the visual, it’s an extension of us. I have yet to go into an artist’s home that’s not cluttered. They’ve always got lots of books and objects, but it’s not chaos. What you see are inspirational things.
Brett Some artists’ places are kind of neat, but that’s indicative of the person. It describes them, which is why I love going into show houses because you get a sense of who lives there. When I walk into an artist’s place, I’m more interested in how they’ve placed their books and their objects informally – away from the gallery. At home it’s unconscious and unstudied. It says a lot.
Brett Yes, all the little bits and bobs. They’re an extension of us but in a very relaxed way.
Brett We’ve got a lot of shit, hey!
Sanell God, they’re really into their trinkets. We’ve got four display cabinets …
Sanell But we use a lot of it … like that bunny over there, that I bought in New York a couple of years ago. I’ve made a painting of it (Eddie Schwarz, 2013). And I’ve got these ceramic boats that I made a painting of (Souvenirs, 2005). You see something and it subconsciously informs what you make.
Much of the house is shared with artworks. In the spare room, sheep have escaped from Sanell’s installation The Collective (2013). Originally there were 13.
The kitchen was added on in the 1950s and it has wonderful natural light. All the fittings are original. The large windows look out at Table Mountain and over the garden. This is where the family spends most of their time. The horseshoe was found buried in the garden.
The cabinet in the passage is filled with trash (Sanell’s word) and sentimental bric-a-brac that Brett collected and refuses to throw away. The light fitting comes from Ikea and the old map of the world was found at a junk shop.
Sanell’s home studio 2 doubles as both a study and a spare room. Her artworks cover the wall: a seascape print, Rogue (2006); the Star Wars storm-trooper image is a monotype print called Uncle (2013); the anatomical pencil drawings are from her student days; and the round canvas was an experiment for a larger work.
The previous owner carved the sandstone fireplace in the sitting room. ‘I appreciate someone who actually carves a fireplace out of sandstone himself, and then builds it,’ says Brett. ‘There’s that sense that someone created these spaces.’ Covered in thick enamel paint, the fireplace had to be sand-blasted before he and Sanell moved in. The parquet floor is original, from the 1950s. Lola plays on the sofa beneath Sanell’s monotype print, Olympus Mons (2013).
In the passage, Gogga comes from a series Brett made, called 12th Official Language (2003), a group of idiosyncratic South African slang words with the subtitle Words make me smile.
‘One of the reasons we fell in love with this house is that it reminded us of a Karoo farmhouse, but in the middle of the city,’ says Sanell. It has two gardens, a simple one at the front on the street and a large Mediterranean garden in the back. Having a quiet moment, Brett sits here on the front stoep reading the papers.
Home studio 1: ‘I used to have my studio at home until my babies were born. The large painting is called Night Bloom (2013) and the smaller portrait is one I painted during a residency in India in 2000. The ladder we use for our bookshelves and my Dad made the small cabinet’ – Sanell.
The bookshelves in the spare room were custom made by Paul Chames to fit into the wall recesses flanking the Victorian fireplace. The two printed eyes are by Jann Cheifitz, and Brett made the white metal swallow light.
Lola’s room is on the corner of the house so it has two sash windows, with their original shutters. Brett and Sanell painted the cherry-blossom mural for her in a soft saffron and pale blue. All her furniture was sourced in Woodstock. She loves books and fantasy play.
Brett’s bronze Pig (2005/6) hogs the limelight on the kitchen counter. On the wall, the two spirographs done with a ballpoint pen came from a street artist in Chile. The Chairman Mao porcelain figurine Sanell and Brett bought in New York.