The women of August House are challenging the strictures of gender

At the opening of Fathema Bemath’s exhibition at the Origin Art gallery, Gordon Froud, the lecturer, sculptor and gallerist, remarked that the term “emerging artist” is often used in reference to young practitioners, forgetting that the circumstances under which one “emerges” are unique.

For Bemath, who has kept a base at August House’s End Street Studios since August 2020 and has run a dental laboratory for close to 30 years, her relatively late entrance as an artist is tied to her upbringing. She uses clay and sometimes bark to comment on the historic representation of black women through the male gaze. She started sculpting during the hard lockdown of March 2020. “My lab had to close for three weeks and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a chance because I’ve always had to put these things on hold,’” she says from her small studio a few days before the show’s opening.

Though her interpretive voice is yet to break, Bemath’s engagement with her medium is striking. Her busts, usually made of fired clay, are individually distinct. Some appear fragile or fractured. Others bear linear scars or the remnants of news text as a result of collaging cuttings with resin. Years before sculpting, Bemath worked with the late Benon Lutaaya, a sometime-collagist who incorporated newspaper fragments into his art. This feature in her work is a fitting ode. At the show, Froud dubbed her a “material fetishist” who derives much enjoyment from the matter itself. 

In an interview for the Meta Foundation’s Meet The Artist series, Bemath referenced the research that the Guerilla Girls posterised in 1989, to the effect that “less than 5% of modern artists shown at the Met Museum were women while more than 85% of the museum’s nudes were female”. 

This discrepancy is mirrored to some degree in the demographics at August House, the downtown building that houses 44 artists. Bemath is one of five women currently making art here. The causes for it are layered, but because of their circuitous routes to making art professionally, Bemath, Antoinette McMaster and Olwethu de Vos respond to it with deep consideration. There are shrewd aspects to Bemath’s process. “I’m 50. I don’t have 20 years to develop a career,” she says. “If I want this, I’ve got to make it happen now. I know how to run a practice as a business owner.”  

Besides the two-hander with Frans Thoka at Origin Art, Bemath’s work also appeared at the Nirox Sculpture Park in September and she made the top 20 at 2021’s Thami Mnyele Fine Art Awards.

De Vos, who has returned to art making from curating, says that her preference for high-relief works is a preparation to sculpt. Based at August House since 2017 when she won the Teresa Lizamore Curatorial Mentorship Programme, De Vos’ initial, smaller studio was a de facto office. “I was having a difficult transition in terms of what I could afford to do,” she says.

At some point, she participated in all-woman show at MM Arthouse in Blairgowrie. She challenged herself to make drawings. “I wanted to present male nudes in a vulnerable way,” De Vos says. “I wanted to make a statement that domestic abuse is also something that women perpetuate because a lot of this starts from behaviour we learn at home.” Because she was still drawn to working with glass, she had a lot of copper wire lying around. “I was curious about what would happen if I used staples instead of just using copper on the [masonite] board,” she says. “Over time I kept pushing the boundary of what one can do with the materials.” For De Vos tactility can be transmuted through narrative coherence.

Her experience as a curator has helped her reverse engineer her career. “When you witness other professional artists working it influences your conduct,” she says.”

Similarly, McMaster has an interest in highlighting domestic abuse, favouring costuming, photography and performance. “I look at the costumes as referring to hidden abuse,” she says. “But there’s always glimpses that come through.”

In Sticks and stones will break my bones But words can also kill me she delves into the psychological dimension of abuse. The work was inspired by lockdown and formed part of her honours degree’s final practicals at Unisa, where she studied fine art. 

This work typifies McMaster’s open-ended approach, which is often collaborative. Based in the East Rand and juggling artmaking with homemaking and a career in the accounting field, McMaster keeps a studio in August House so as to be in communion with other artists.

Digital prints of her other series, Not Quite Hidden, line one side of her tiny studio. In it, costumed models with large petal-like, or feathery masks fashioned out of fabric are framed by smoky backgrounds and minimal shrubbery. When her complete oeuvre is considered, you are struck by her broad artistic range and her eye for texture. She resists pigeonholing. Her last relationship with a gallery was short-lived because “I didn’t think my work suited the gallery”, she says. She prefers to work in the realm of “conversation starters” as opposed to “pretty pictures”, though she exhibits a dexterity to blur the two. 

She joyously mentions that her work is gathering interest overseas, sending me a link to mosi-o-tunya.org. Her upcoming series, a look at the environmental damage caused by fast fashion juxtaposes costumes from synthetic waste and natural material.

While all three artists can lay claim to a sense of community at August House, due to various circumstances, such as balancing other careers and the demands of family, they all interact in the space differently. On the challenges to attracting more women to August House, Meta Foundation director Sara Hallatt, who undertakes the marketing and programming of the studios, says that some of the concerns about interacting with the inner city are perception based and others are indeed legitimate.

“We did have a lot more women artists and lost some of those during Covid. We have been striving to bolster our woman population here. We do this through our Women to Watch Award, which runs annually. And our studio exchange programme will take a direct focus on a woman artist and one from the LBTQI community. This would be free studio rental for a year.” Hallatt says the Open Studios initiative also serves as an outreach project to women artists.

Kwanele Sosibo is participating in a Writer’s Residency at August House facilitated by the African Art Content Agency, a non-commercial art journalism project. 

Open Studios takes place on Sunday October 30 from 10.30am until 4pm. Tickets are R30 online or R50 at the door. The programme includes meeting 40 artists, a screen printing demonstration, a kids area and food and drinks will be on sale. A shuttle service ferries guests from Access City. Tickets can be purchased through Quicket. Visit www.augusthouse.co.za for more information.