Fiberworks - A Celebration of South African
Fiber and Textile Artists

Title: Intertextures

Description: Fibre sculptor Celia de Villiers organically collages fibres and yarns from a foundation of fetishes, which evoke the primal and the postmodern. She embroiders by hand and machine, and weaves together wood and wire. The resulting rich surface textures are dyed using various natural and chemical substances.

Via the fragmentation and layering of textiles, de Villiers seeks to express the repetitive rituals of daily living, growth and decay. Her sculptures and graphics often address post-feminist issues, drawing on ancient myths and modern obsessions concerning women. Through symbols that are universal as well as deeply personal, she communicates her existential experience as a means of making sense of the world.

De Villiers says, ‘Art is a conversation, an experiment between the spiritual and the physical. But it’s not like science. It is more philosophical, like alchemy. The accidents, the imperfections – slashes and stains – speak of human frailty, and the vulnerability of the body in performance.'

The artist’s work has featured in many exhibitions worldwide. International companies have commissioned her work. She is a Visual Arts Lecturer at Universities in South Africa and Europe.

Title: Love Potion

Description: Ancient folklore recommended sewing a mixture of crushed vervain, Southwood and orris-root into a green silk bag on Friday. Pinning the bag to one’s under garments, next to the skin, would secure one’s love.

Celia de Villiers is a visual arts lecturer and conducts workshops and community empowerment projects in drawing, painting, sculpture and textile related crafts worldwide.

This artwork is an extension of her research into belief systems, amulets, fetishes and good luck charms.

Title: Disavowal

Description: Contemporary cultural anxieties, desires, and pre-occupations include the often eroticised interface between technology and the flesh. Disavowal refers to bio-technology, cloning, hybrids and the futuristic post human. It is about the undermining of traditional constructs of human identity, evoking dissociating behaviour such as fetishism which includes doubling and disavowal.

The illusionism of the artwork enters into contemporary debates about the aesthetic of delightful horror. It has a sense of aversion-attraction. The tactile qualities and sensual shapes of Disavowal are seductive and are aimed at stimulating the desire to stroke them, but due to the animalistic hybrid forms and slimy 'Gothicised' creatures included in them.

Title: Liminal Rite

Description: The red shawl was made during the last five years of a ten year process of sub-conscious, traumatic and fragmented 'knowing' - a liminal phase of contemplation and mental preparation.

A liminal phase in ones life is a rite of passage and offers an interstice to facilitate a mental shift. Creating the artwork became a meditative, ritualistic and transformative process dependent on visualization and the articulation of situations via reflective thinking. The creation of the shawl became a transitional object in this process of uncovering meaning. I am now free of past constraints and have journeyed into the next phase. The completion of the artwork has been an appropriate ritual of closure.

Title: Re-Rooting

Description: Since uprooting myself and relocating to Europe I have been living in homes under renovation. At the time of meeting my arts professor husband in 2013 he told me that apart from oil painting, drawing and site-specific art, he builds. Far from joking, I have now learned much about converting old buildings into an artist's retreat in Portugal. We regard these daunting projects as giant collages, monumental sculptures or artworks in progress. However, the masculine environment and materials constantly surrounding me have inevitably required some downscaling and feminising, as reflected in this small artwork.

Title: Beyond an inferno

Description: Memory itself is a re-imagining of what is lost or gone. "If loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains-how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained" (The Politics of Mourning. Eng, D L and Kazanjian, D. 2003 (eds) Berkeley. University of California Press: p.ix)

On 15 October 2017 wildfires destroyed many forests, our garden, olive grove, and a warehouse in Portugal containing most of my possessions shipped from South Africa in 2016. A lifetime collection of vintage textiles, yarns, artworks and household goods had vanished.

Compelled to express the disaster, I repeatedly made drawings of our burnt power-tools over the next two years. I translated those aftermath drawings by embroidering into a vintage silk quilt with threads donated by friends. I included some wools and twines, which I had removed from the warehouse, two weeks prior to the fire. Uncannily, those yarns turned out to be the exact colours of the mangled metal and charred cork trees still surrounding me.

By inverting my drawings, the machine tools and ruined forests became an imaginary, surreal place of memory, an ambiguous stitched trauma-scape, navigated by my threads.

Title: Beyond the inferno's edge

Description: In 2017 the forest wildfires in Portugal claimed many lives and destroyed a warehouse containing most of my possessions shipped from South Africa in 2016. Two weeks prior I had removed single box of yarns hoping to start an artwork.

Uncannily this only legacy remaining after a lifetime of collecting vintage textiles, threads, wools, artworks and household goods turned out to be the exact colours left behind by the fire. Burnt debris and the ensuing rain had yielded astonishing hues, tints and textures, seductive corrosive marks and congealed contorted shapes. Feeling compelled to express the delightful horror of this disaster, I started knitting with kebab sticks and re-claimed crochet hooks, whilst contemplating the repercussions and trying to articulate some meaning about the event. The artwork was eventually completed with knitting needles provided by my daughter and a friend and is contextualised by site-specific relics from the inferno.

Title: Muti Bag

Description: A decorative version of the medicine bag carried by Traditional Healers in South Africa. The textures and colours emulate the fruits and roots used for their potions. The inner lining consists of glitzy animal print fabrics to signify their belief that certain animals have magic and superhuman qualities. In a ritual of 'throwing the bones', each bone has a particular significance; for instance; pig bones are a symbol of power because pigs need very little to survive. The bone of an antelope indicates speed and intelligence, baboon bones are related to human behaviour and marriage, and goat bones indicate disease. Bones are thrown repeatedly in consultations with a Sangoma (tribal healer) and gradually, by process of elimination the source of one"s problem is found.

This artwork has featured in a South African school text book published by Pearson international publishers.

Title: Aquatic Insurrection

Description: This artwork comment on Hydropolitics - the precarious future availability of water and water resources.

Aquatic life in rivers, streams and oceans has been adversely affected due to the concentrations of pollutants, such as heavy metals and chemicals. Humans will fight for their territory, but aquatic life forms cannot fight back. Instead, they succumb. If we could endow them with extended life, what utopian qualities would we bestow on them? The creatures of Aquatic insurrection are armed with weapons to defend their waning territory; they are both tragic and amusing.

Each living creature has an underbelly soft as a fish. It is the ability to mutate in contaminated environments which will perpetuate their power to survive.

Title: Aquatic Insurrection (Details)

Description: This artwork comment on Hydropolitics - the precarious future availability of water and water resources.

Aquatic life in rivers, streams and oceans has been adversely affected due to the concentrations of pollutants, such as heavy metals and chemicals. Humans will fight for their territory, but aquatic life forms cannot fight back. Instead, they succumb. If we could endow them with extended life, what utopian qualities would we bestow on them? The creatures of Aquatic insurrection are armed with weapons to defend their waning territory; they are both tragic and amusing.

Each living creature has an underbelly soft as a fish. It is the ability to mutate in contaminated environments which will perpetuate their power to survive.

Title: Litany

Description: Human interaction with the environment has produced ecological problems that defy current scientific understanding. Species reproduce, transfer their characteristics and mutate in response to environmental influences. Prof Thorsten Reusch (2013, Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, Germany) states that marine pollution may eventually result in genetically mutated organisms. For example, toxic waste may cause genomic drifts in existing plants and animals, which disrupts natural evolution, alter the composition of organisms and the functioning of ecosystems.

Sadly, it remains rare for industry to be in full legal compliance with the biosafety protocols as set by governments for the sake of environmental health and, the prevention of ecological degradation and conservation. This artwork (created entirely from repurposed post-consumer materials) is an ironic comment on such genetic adaptations due to plastic pollution of the oceans. The artist has subtly mutated organic and industrially-processed materials such as linen, cotton, wool and silk, by adding artificial chemically produced materials such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics to create these imaginary ocean plants.

Title: Litany Pod Details

Description: Human interaction with the environment has produced ecological problems that defy current scientific understanding. Species reproduce, transfer their characteristics and mutate in response to environmental influences. Prof Thorsten Reusch (2013, Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, Germany) states that marine pollution may eventually result in genetically mutated organisms. For example, toxic waste may cause genomic drifts in existing plants and animals, which disrupts natural evolution, alter the composition of organisms and the functioning of ecosystems.

Sadly, it remains rare for industry to be in full legal compliance with the biosafety protocols as set by governments for the sake of environmental health and, the prevention of ecological degradation and conservation. This artwork (created entirely from repurposed post-consumer materials) is an ironic comment on such genetic adaptations due to plastic pollution of the oceans. The artist has subtly mutated organic and industrially-processed materials such as linen, cotton, wool and silk, by adding artificial chemically produced materials such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics to create these imaginary ocean plants.

Celia de Villiers