The Cape Town Castle was built in 1655 as the headquarters of the original colonizers of the country, the Dutch East India Company. The Company mission was to set up a vegetable garden to service Dutch ships on the way to India and the Far East. The Dutch ships were ostensibly involved in the spice trade, but slave trading, too, soon became part of their agenda. Three centuries later, under the apartheid National Party government, the Castle served as the headquarters of the military.
Under the new democratic government, from 1994, the administration of the Castle was given to the state Department of Arts and Culture and the army was moved out. In 1995, artists Kevin Brand and Brett Murray approached the new administrators to ask for permission to stage a group show in B Block at the Castle, the oldest colonial building standing in South Africa. Said Murray, “I felt that as white people, we were metaphorically wresting the keys to the Castle from the [military] forces which had been allegedly ‘protecting our interests’ in our name.”
The title the group decided on for their exhibition was Scurvy, the skin disease that would attack sailors at sea deprived of fresh vegetables, a serious problem for the sea-trading Dutch with their Far East interests.
Cape Town artist Lisa Brice was one of the seven participating artists. Apart from sculptors Brand and Murray, the other four were painter Kate Gottgens and mixed media artists Andrew Putter, Barend de Wet, and Wayne Barker.
Says Brice, commenting on her reaction to the invitation to exhibit, “I found the space overwhelming because of its long history of colonial, slave, and apartheid military activities.” The barred, fortified architecture also brought up more immediate associations for Brice.
At the time artists were planning work for this show, barred windows and high walls were rapidly becoming the defining characteristic of a white suburbia arming itself against a rising crime rate. Brice herself had come home one night to blood-covered walls and a housemate who had been stabbed numerous times by a burglar. The housemate survived, but the experience left Brice badly shaken. For the Scurvy show she planned work addressing the issue of protection against home break-ins.
Her installation, Make Your Home Your Castle, derived much of its imagery and slogans from ads for security firms in the yellow pages of the telephone directory. Brice hung oversize cutouts of furniture made of strong security wire mesh on the walls and displayed pillows with the embroidered reminder BURGLAR ALARM ON? presented a large-scale cutout of a kneeling woman polishing the floor. On her hip is a gun.
The material Brice used for the surface of the figure’s body and clothing is linoleum, integrating her into the suburban home in which comfort and fear have been inexorably linked.
Make Your Home Your Castle (detail) 1995
Mixed media installation
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Ronnie Levitan
© Lisa Brice
What Is a Home Without an Armed Mother? 1995
Linoleum, wood, plaster plaque
183 x 194 cm
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Lisa Brice