Elmie Smit’s first solo exhibition will open at Cloof on 23 November (and moves thereafter to 44 High Street, Darling). The exhibition opens at 11.00 am, and will followed by a Gourmet BBQ.
Celebrating African Fabric is the theme of my paintings and drawings. I paint still-lives of seasonal flowers and fruit arranged on fabric. These arrangements are set up in my studio and I paint from these real life objects.
Africa is a vast continent, pulsating with creativity. Fabrics are used for many purposes in everyday life. Mostly it is the women who wear the brightly coloured and patterned fabric wrapped around their bodies, called kangas, chitenjes, or kikois. These are used to carry babies on backs, for dresses and headdresses, for anything that needs a bit of cloth. These cotton prints made in factories all over Africa are called fancy prints.
More precious than the cotton prints are hand woven cloths made from sisal, bark, cotton and silk they are intricate and valuable. These cloths are used for ceremonies of birth, marriage, death and for the inauguration of kings and queens.
As a child growing up in Pretoria and travelling around the then Transvaal, I saw women dressed in these fabrics. I saw Ndebele women wearing neck, arm and leg rings, wrapped in this cloth. I saw men with decorated bicycles. I saw the Sisishwe fabrics or Sis used for everyday dresses. My father worked at the Pretoria Zoo and the craft market outside used to be one of my favourite places filled with African beadwork, clay pots and baskets.
Backpacking through Malawi in the 80’s found me buying up brightly coloured cloths from the market places. The colours and patterns amazing, decorated with the everyday and the unusual. I saw cloth with big butterflies and then saw the actual butterflies for myself fluttering around the African flame tree, bright orange and blue.
In Mozambique, on holiday with my family, the everyday wear for the women there are the fancy prints, decorated with patterns of cell phones, sport shoes, labels, leaves, flowers and cashew nuts, to name a few. I just love the way the prints represent what they are surrounded with in everyday life.
I brought these cloths to Darling with my longing to travel through Africa. In oils I capture the warm, bright, intense, earthy, mystical and sophisticated African fabrics with what is in my everyday life here; Pomegranates, figs, seashells, vases from our museum and antique shops. Every Saturday I listen to Steve Wamba and loose myself in the African music. Africa is in my blood and a huge part of my creative inspiration, it is always in my paintings sometimes hidden a bit, beneath the surface but always there.