Metal nuts, bolts, and washers are the trusty friends of a plumber. Yet, in the hands of artist Doreen Southwood, these utilitarian objects are the surprising components of an exquisitely refined artwork. Curtain (2005) is a wall-high stainless-steel sculpture that evokes, with sleight of hand, floral curtain fabric associated with the artist’s grandmother.
The individual elements of this tapestry-like composition become clear as the viewer approaches it: Hundreds of nuts, bolts, and washers are sensitively patterned into rich, brocadelike decorative forms. They are held in place solely by the invisible tug of coin-size magnets attached to the back of the reflective metal sheet—a powerful but somewhat tenuous ordering principle. A single magnet removed would cause a few pieces of the intricate pattern to fall to the ground. Southwood describes Curtain as a “surface to hide other surfaces: you never know what’s behind it.” Curtain evokes the precarious condition of the fragile in an uncertain world, a transient sense of order threatened by insubstantial anchors to reality.
A similar theme is evident in Southwood’s Slipway (2002), created for Homeport (2002), a public art event at Cape Town’s waterfront hosted by arts organization Public Eye, working with Cell, of Rotterdam, Netherlands, as part of a worldwide project involving port cities. The artist used letters cut out of wood and painted white to form poetic phrases of personal pathos, such as “I touch you, you hurt me.” The letters, which appeared to float, were, in fact, attached to an unseen support framework that lay on the bed of the harbor next to a dock. Like the boats and sailors who use the harbor, however, her poem was at the mercy of the tides. As the tide came in, the letters receded from view.
In Sindroom (2007), commissioned by the Vrijplaats Project, the artist created an installation in a park in Tilburg, Netherlands, that was intended to disorient the viewer by the disturbing realness of its subject matter and life-size scale. In this work a 1.5-meter bronze painted girl stands, slightly forlorn, before a twin swing set of galvanized steel, with rubber seats made from discarded car tires. One swing is set at a jaunty angle, as if just vacated; the other strains on its chain seven meters above the cement ground. The empty swing is forever frozen a moment before its imminent crashing descent.
The area in Tilburg where Sindroom is located has many street names recalling a common Dutch/South African history, and Southwood’s work touches on the themes of uncertainty and personal struggle, a difficult exploration of how one positions oneself within the legacy of a conservative culture, as in white South African society, with its Dutch heritage.
Sindroom (detail) 2007
Galvanized steel structure, concrete, car-tire rubber
715 x 490 x 700 cm
Public commission for the town of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Doreen Southwood
© Doreen Southwood
Sindroom 2007
Galvanized steel structure, concrete, car-tire rubber
715 x 490 x 700 cm
Public commission for the town of Tilburg, The Netherlands
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Doreen Southwood
© Doreen Southwood
Curtain 2005
Nuts, bolts, magnetic discs, low-grade stainless steel, digital print onto steel surface
231 x 60 cm
Image courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Kathy Grundlingh
© Doreen Southwood
Slipway Homeport project, Cape Town harbor 2001
Wood, metal, paint
3 x 4 m
Image courtesy the artist
Photographer: Doreen Southwood
© Doreen Southwood