img_20161005_175422-2-jpg-collageFibreworks IX, is a vibrant, fibre art exhibition produced by colossally talented artists. Powerful story-tellers all, who cross boundaries, alchemise their environs, and harmonise materials and colours – for the beholder’s delight.

The exhibition is a labour and love of 25 pairs of hands that for two decades have joined with 25 other artists from all over South Africa to show what can be created with the use of a needle and thread.
These artists come from a variety of backgrounds but are united in their passion for design possibilities in this expressive art form.
Most use a mixed media approach. You’ll see traditional and non traditional techniques, low-tech and high-tech, hand and machine work, a vast array of fabrics from silks to metal gauze, the use of some unusual tools like heat guns and soldering irons, and unexpected embellishments like mirrors, metal washers, string, bits of china …

Over the years the Fibreworks collective has collaborated with community art projects such as the oh-so creative Keiskamma and Kaross embroiderers, as well as invited guests like Andrew Verster and Peter Clarke to join their biennial, national exhibitions.
Their common thread is synergy – they support each other by sharing textile-related information, exhibition opportunities and are open to artistically critiquing each other.

What you’ll also see are the stories, where colour and motifs are used, rather than text.
Though, with perfect stitches, Judy Martin words have artfully been ‘’written’’:
‘’Making something slowly with your hands is one of the most nourishing things you can do.
The hand stitch is a slow method of making a mark, and seems to hold time and make it visible.
There is power in cloth that has been stitched by hand.’’

And Mogalakwena gallery owner Elbé Coetsee, in her definitive book about creative, craft intersections in South Africa, shares the words and ethos of Yinka Shonibare, the British/ Nigerian conceptual artist & designer, and MBE: ‘’Fabrics are to Africa what monuments are to the West’’.

Textiles probably are Africa’s most expressive art form. Über trend forecaster Li Edlekoort predicts that in reaction to increasingly digital landscapes, there will be an increasing (and commensurate) return of textiles and things artisinal … that go way beyond gin!
A blossoming of things handcrafted, painstakingly time-consuming, imaginatively enriching. So here’s to these artists who are challenging paint as ‘’the’’ medium of pictoral authority …

What else can you look at here is a display from Major Minors. These are intentionally miniature pieces (all the better to travel abroad, as they have, to America, England, Australia, New Zealand, Germany). Like sculpture, these tactile textiles project a ‘here-ness’ as opposed to a ‘there-ness’ of painted imagery – and there’s a miniature catalogue to tuck into your bag.

Upstairs, you can linger over Mogalakwena’s permanent exhibition created by a rural, North Sotho community – where embroidered panels are ethnographic vignettes that tell the community’s stories – and visually document their lives, since most of the makers can’t write.

And in further celebration is an exhibition in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront: Ubuntutu: Life Legacies of love and action
Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation and Michigan State University Museum, in association with quilt artists in South Africa and the United States, have partnered to develop an exhibition and accompanying publication to pay tribute to the indelible contributions that Desmond & Leah Tutu have made in addressing human rights in South Africa and around the world.