Lining curio stalls across Africa, carved and painted depictions of figures from the colonial period in Africa stare out at passing tourists. Known in art circles as “colon” figures, these small sculptures, generally representing Europeans, often wear white pith helmets and tropical uniforms, or perhaps a bright military jacket. Westerners have long been intrigued by the figures, allowing them to see themselves through the eyes of those they have colonized.
Addressing her own status as a white African, sculptor Claudette Schreuders reinterprets the tradition of the colon figure from the colonizer’s point of view. In Schreuders’s hand-carved wooden sculptures, the artist exaggerates the face, hands, and feet of the figures, using their form to emphasize their emotive qualities. The bodies are foreshortened, giving the figures a sense of substantial solidity. Schreuders uses this formal language to explore her own emotional environment, creating a series of sculptures linked by a narrative that grows out of particular points of her life.
Born in 1973, Schreuders had grown up under apartheid. Her first exhibition, Burnt by the Sun, at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2001, explored the experience of growing up as a white person in Africa.
Schreuders works in jacaranda, a pale cream wood with a beautiful and subtle grain. To depict skin the artist leaves the wood uncovered on the areas of her sculptures representing flesh, and paints on clothing details. Schreuders also makes a lithographic image of each work to, in essence, archive them.
The sculptures are usually quiet and restrained, suggesting the unanimated design of their colon antecedents but also drawing on other influences, such as Spanish and South American folk art. “I don’t like that frozen in action look,” says the artist. This style also reflects the difficulties of articulating gestural movement convincingly in wood.
Nevertheless, in her 2007 exhibition at Shainman, The Fall, which references the biblical fable of Adam and Eve, Schreuders challenged herself to make the most complex figures yet. In one work, The Beginning (2006), the Eve figure is shown literally emerging from the chest of the man, a moving and tender representation of the mutual dependence and growth of a loving relationship. Other figures in this series include a stricken Eve, hands covering her face, cast out from paradise, and a woman giving birth to a baby, whose tiny feet emerging from the belly of his mother seem to complete the cycle of the relationship between the man and the woman.
Schreuders depicts the birthing process, but her sculpture also represents a more fundamental aspect of giving birth—the strange bodily splitting of the self into two separate beings. Her sculpture is deceptively simple, yet the stillness of the mother does not preclude a deep psychological awareness. In the same way, the personal aspect of Schreuders’s work does not deflect the wider significance of her stocky creations.
The Owner of Two Swimsuits 2000
Jacaranda wood and enamel paint
110 cm high
Image courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photographer: Jan Verboom
Collection: Howard Ellins
© Claudette Schreuders
The Free Girl (detail) 2004
Jacaranda wood, enamel paint
123 cm high
Commissioned by Season South Africa for Personal Affects
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Mario Todeschini
Collection: Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
© Claudette Schreuders
Public Figure (detail) 2007
Jacaranda wood, jelutong wood, enamel paint
102 x 30 x 22 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photographer: Jan Verboom
© Claudette Schreuders
The Beginning 2006
Jacaranda wood
46 x 84 x 33 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photographer: Jan Verboom
Collection: Gregor Woeltje
© Claudette Schreuders
Arrival 2006
Jacaranda wood and enamel paint
54 x 35 x 75 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photographer: Jan Verboom
Collection: Gregor Woeltje
© Claudette Schreuders
Trespasser 2006
Avocado wood and enamel paint
81 x 28 x 25 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photographer: Jan Verboom
Collection: Carin Kuoni
© Claudette Schreuders
The Virgin 2007
60 x 20 x 20 cm
Jelutong wood, enamel paint
Image courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photographer: Jan Verboom
Collection: Josef Vascovitz, WA
© Claudette Schreuders