In ‘Gilt’, Mary Evans incorporates SA history and Cape Town itself into installations

An important and perhaps under-the-radar international exhibition is in the middle of its long museum run at Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town. The show, by British-Nigerian artist Mary Evans, is part of a programme of in-depth solo exhibitions at the museum that tell the stories of contemporary art history from Africa and its diaspora. Evans, who has made this the focus of her work over decades of international exhibition, provides SA audiences with access to a multi-layered engagement with the social, historical and aesthetics of black visuality and iconography.

She often, as in this show, works with materials associated with craft, female domestic labour and ephemerality, such as doilies and paper plates. In this exhibition, titled “Gilt” as a play on the gold gilt paint that defines much of the painting work on the show and the guilt felt by oppressed black bodies in colonial history, she has incorporated much of the museum space and the history of SA and Cape Town itself into the installations. She also deploys wall murals — which she terms “history paintings” in a knowing nod to the same tradition in Western art history — to reflect on the diasporic and violent history of much of the country’s and the city’s population.

The exhibition’s centrepiece installation, Gingerbread (2023) features hundreds of delicately baked and eminently consumable gingerbread figures stowed neatly in the taped outline of a slave vessel. The graphic and simplified nature of the work and its clear irony adds to its impact, in a city that was active in the colonial slave trade and has its own slave museum.

James Sey asked the artist to delve a little deeper into the work on show.   

James Sey (JS): Could you speak about the interplay between material and meaning in your work — in particular, traditionally feminine or domestic materials such as doilies and paper plates, as well as the mural form you allude to?

Mary Evans (ME): The interplay between material and meaning is crucial in my practice. I use cheap disposable materials to echo the way black lives have been considered cheap and disposable historically and contemporaneously. Brown paper is used to package and ship goods around the world. I use it to illustrate how black lives have been packaged and shipped as goods historically. At the end of an exhibition those works are sprayed with water, scraped off the wall and disposed of. In relation to the doilies and plates, the doilies are a bit more personal. My mum always used to use doilies on Sundays when we were young. To me it felt like a declaration that we had “arrived” in the UK in the late 60s and British people used doilies on Sundays to serve tea. The paper plates are more to do with the British tradition of commemorating important Royal events on plates, other crockery, and tea towels. I wanted to use the site of the “plate” to commemorate black figures in history and today. The disposability of the plates is in concert with my general ethos of the temporary and the itinerant. I do my best to make the plates look “real” but the illusion of impermanence is still there as is the impermanence of the immigrant experience.

JS: How are you conceiving of the idea of an African diaspora in this exhibition? There seems to be more at stake than historical displacement or population migrations.

ME: The notion of the African diaspora sits at the centre of my practice. I don’t think of it as a single entity. I hope that by explicitly depicting black figures, the diaspora is invoked or implied. Everywhere I have made my work in the past 30

years there has been an African diaspora whether it’s been in France, Martinique, USA, Jamaica, UK or the Netherlands. I am of the African diaspora so perhaps I make assumptions as to how my work will be received in various geographical locations. There is a difference I think when I show the work on the African continent; so far, Nigeria and SA. In these locations I suspect my guard is down and I consider that the work is at “home”. I am interested in diaspora in general and made “Thousands are Sailing” an impactful piece of work at EVA in Limerick in Ireland in 2016. This work was based on Irish Immigration and diaspora. Ireland was Britain’s first colonial project in the 17th century. I grew up in an Irish neighbourhood in North London in the 70s with people who had similar aspirations to my own family.

In “Vista”, the site-specific work in the Gilt exhibition at Zeitz Mocaa, I wanted to show African bodies at rest and not in fight or flight mode. There are very ordinary poses and very positive poses such as figures practising ballet or generally just in repose. I try to be careful to depict the black body at leisure, which I really shouldn’t have to do but somehow it seems necessary. In the History Paintings series in the Gilt exhibition, the context required the figures to be more animated, so they are generally in fight-or-flight mode with raised fists and dynamic postures because of the context of the narratives. My repertoire of poses is fluid and contingent on the space, research, place and current events.

Gilt, by Mary Evans

Zeitz MOCAA Cape Town until October 29 2023