Paying devout lip service to Christian and family values, Afrikaans-speaking families in the eighties would follow Sunday morning church with a generous lunch of roast meat (often more than one kind of animal flesh would be offered on the groaning table), vegetables, rice, gravy, and a colorful array of desserts. Solid and heavy, like the meal itself, the table around which the family would be seated was substantial, often with a style of carved wooden feet known as ball and claw.
For artist Doreen Southwood, the “family values” that such occasions were supposed to represent were prejudiced and discriminatory and incongruent with the inclusive values espoused by South Africa’s new post-1994 democracy. Herself the daughter of a strict Afrikaans farming family, Southwood took away the symbolic power of this icon of middle-class conservatism by reshaping the legs of the heavy dining-room table so they could no longer fulfill their function and keep the table standing upright. Southwood’s Table (2003) lies on its side, its legs hobbled together, tied with rope, unable to offer support to the family dinner any longer. In disempowering the piece of furniture, Southwood has moved away from the family circle that once held her captive.
But adopting change is not easy, however much it is desired. In another metaphor for the process of self-discovery, the artist presents the figure of a young girl poised on the end of a diving board. Says Southwood, “People want me to swim, but I know that I’m going to be filled up and drown. I can’t swim anymore . . . but I still find myself with this little outfit on, at the end of a diving board, and I’m still standing there and reluctantly reconsidering.” The Swimmer (2003) is a slight, stoical painted bronze figure, readying herself to leap. Curiously, the figure features a drain hole on her hip. A drain should let water out, but perhaps this plug hole will operate in the opposite manner and let water in should the swimmer take the plunge—a manifestation of the artist’s fears of taking the plunge into an uncertain future.
The instant before a diver makes a leap into the air is often inflected with a frisson of irrational fear. For Southwood’s figure this irrational, unconscious dread is about to be realized. No longer privileged by a white skin, and protected, even if unwillingly, by her family, the swimmer must plunge into the uncertainties of the transforming South Africa. There is no retreat, no matter how much the figure longs to escape her difficult legacy and abort her dive.
Table 2003
Wood, paint, rope
53.5 x 116 x 82 cm
Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery
Photographer: Abrie Fourie
© Doreen Southwood
The Swimmer 2003
Painted bronze
43 x 150 x 200 cm
Collections: Johannesburg
Art Gallery, Spier, University of Cape Town, JCI
Image courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Wim Botha
© Doreen Southwood