Democracy’s arrival in South Africa in 1994 brought myriad changes in the social fabric. In the art world this included the acceleration of the acceptance of an international trend to conflate notions of art and craft. Beadwork, formerly the preserve of rural women, started appearing more regularly in contemporary South African art as a considered appropriation of tradition and a statement about the generally advanced divide between “high art” and artifact. Beading’s association with the gendered labor of so-called “women’s work” and the cultural significance of particular designs and colors associated with South African traditions offered a powerful metaphor that was variously adopted by visual artists. Johannesburg-based Frances Goodman is among them.
In Goodman’s wall sculptures Bead Series (2004–06), the artist inscribes each convex oval with a two-word phrase, laboriously stitched in beads and glittery sequins into gaudy elliptical plaques. The emotions are each qualified by an adjective usually relating to a bodily function and a related play on words—such as “Deadly Serious,” “Spitting Anger,” or “Seething Resentment.” “I wanted to create a surface that was at odds with the context,” says Goodman of these pieces, which merge the physical and the emotional.
The mundane, the trivial, and the ordinary—exemplified in her use of everyday craft materials in Bead Series and in her Toilet Graffiti Embroideries series—have long been of interest to Goodman. The artist believes such quotidian materials and gestures can obscure “dark places”—difficult issues and even violent emotions people do not wish to acknowledge. Across a broad spectrum of media that includes sound art, video, and installation, the artist has explored routines and their flirtations with the themes of obsession, paranoia, and neuroses, and how they can be bubbling beneath a surface of calm.
I know what you’re thinking (2007), a sound installation, extends Goodman’s preoccupation with the innuendo and subtext of words as seen in Bead Series—this time in spoken form. Concealing speakers in columns constructed to look as if they are part of the gallery architecture, compelling her audience to lean close to the columns to listen in, the artist plays back recordings of quotes and snippets of anonymous conversations, “the things people say when they think you’re sympathetic with them,” says Goodman. Quotes that start with phrases such as, “I’m not racist but . . .” expose the prejudice and judgment inherent in the words while inviting the voyeuristic listener to be guilty of the same critical sniping.
Holding up for our inspection the emotions and the language of the everyday, Goodman invites us to consider, more closely, inherited beliefs—in both South African and other international communities—sewn into the social fabric and passed on from one generation to the next.
Toilet Graffiti Embroideries 2007
Embroidery thread, satin, embroidery hoop
Dimensions variable
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Frances Goodman
Bead Series 2006
Beads, silk, thread
42 x 34 x 8 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Frances Goodman