Fiberworks - A Celebration of South African
Fiber and Textile Artists

Title: Raw Edges

Description: Reality T.V. War. Newsman or sports commentator?
Either way, I watch - a spectator, vicariously involved in someone else’s experience.

Great explosions, fire, night vision and the flashing arcs of tracer bullets across a blackened sky seduce me. This is a video war game – heroic, spectacular, entertaining, safe.

I make ‘Raw Edges.’

Textures ripped, minutely stitched then severed and shredded. Fragile fabrics fragment and unravel. Now the slippery, smooth facelessness of precision strikes begin to interface with the real, shabby dismemberment on the fringes. Feelings transform. Frayed edges painfully pinned down and wrapped up. War fetish.

This re-presentation brings me to my senses.

Title: Touching Identity

Description: Who are we?

We are South Africans, Moslems, Blacks, Whites, Christians, Americans, Jews, British, Arabs.

Who are they?

They are Arabs, Jews, Blacks, South Africans, Christians, Whites, British, Moslems, Americans.

This work is neither anti-Islamic nor anti-Western, nor does it suggest solutions to the notion of "nationhood", whatever that means. Rather, I hope the work explores imaginatively some of the phobias and suspicions that we hold about "Other", those people who are not "Us".
Flags with their colours and symbols go some way in revealing how we choose, as a group, to define whom we are.

Title: New Flags

Description: New Flags is a tissue paper and fabric collage interpretation of Touching Identity. The changed medium has imparted a new spirit and fresh meaning upon the work. The medium of an artwork is always significant. Lying between the idea and act, between imagination and expression, it provides the platform for the medium-meaning interaction.

Title: Free Fall

Description: The work alludes to the symbolism associated with the labyrinth and the mandala.

Title: Screens - Major Minor Signatures 2005

Description: This work celebrated the co-operative efforts of Fibreworks members who took part in Major Minors, a travelling exhibition of miniature fibre/textile artworks that was launched in May 2003.

Title: In my Skin

Description: Currently I am particularly interested in working three dimensionally - in new media, ceramic and paper. Old media, really! I enjoy finding ways of incorporating ready made materials such as leather and beads into my textiles. It's debatable if they are still textiles. Anyway, I always love a debate .... The doll and doll drawings of my students, the Garret Artists, inspired the work. It invites play and tactile, physical interaction.

Title: Blood and Fire

Description: This work was inspired by the events of September 11th 2001. I have torn and frayed some of the fabric to the point of disintegration. Here is something fragile and precious, like an ancient shroud, that is easily dismembered. The work, in part, deals with the idea of collapse and loss The associations of Blood and Fire are ancient, rich and layered and deeply ingrained in the human phyche. They are ambivalent images since they can symbolize divine or demonic, creative or destructive forces. Blood relates to ritual and violence, suffering and redemption. A blood sacrifice is both physical and spiritual, sticky matter evoking transformative states.
Blood and Fire are the symbols of both martyrs and poticial and religious fundamentalists.

Title: Nest/ bowls/baskets

Description: How ARE things?

This is part of a mixed-media artwork that explores some of the stored meanings of bowls, baskets and nests. The title was inspired by the book," How Are Things? A Philosophical Experiment", by Roger-Pol Droit who is a research fellow at the CNRS in Paris.

Title: Bone Woman

Description: The work alludes to ancient and timeless rituals associated with women and women's circles.

As a child I never played with dolls as I found them sinister and alien. Now, oddly, in my 50's I am making my own and using them as metaphors to comment on various issues.

These works form part of a series.

Title: Power of One

Description: This mandala is based on the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals. A symbol image alluding to mystery and transcendence. Archetypal and universal, the circle embraces and encompasses All in One.

Title: Keeping in Touch - an altered Mixed Media Book

Description: This is a collaborative, altered book involving some 70 artists and some community groups. Participating artists in Liza Gillespie's book "Innovative Threads A Decade of South African Fibre Art" published in 2009, were asked to alter their page: some modified their image, others created new pages. The book was first deconstructed in order to insert the new page alongside the old, and then reconstructed using an accordion binding.

Title: Altered Catalogues

Description: The Fibreworks Catalogues that accompanied the travelling exhibitions Major Minors I and Major Minors II are further examples of altered books..

Jeanette Gilks







Website:- http://www.archivalplatform.org/news/entry/keeping_in_touch