Family values and the natural landscape

Christine Jacobs feels like a compadre, a homie, a woman after my own heart, one who gave me permission to be myself when we recently spoke about her journey into fine art. I am always keen to see new and fresh work by artists based in Cape Town, especially if the artist in question is a Free State homie. “Enfold”, Jacobs’s recent exhibition at Southern Guild Gallery, is just one of her many milestones. “There [were] many fields before I got into fine arts,” Jacobs quips in our WhatsApp call, reflecting on her solo exhibition. As during an earlier interview, a week before opening, I feel comfortable around her.

When I entered the gallery space for the first interview, the petite artist ushered me in with a familiarity I understood, having also spent some time in the flat land of the Free State as a young girl. It is a confidence that most Cape Town folk pull off, without letting you in on the secret. Perhaps it is the mountain that grounds many of the people who live in the city and its surroundings. Maybe Cape Town is changing as the art landscape develops.

Coming from Joburg with its industrial, corporate, keep-it-moving sensibility, her lovely smile coupled with a warm hug settled me into our hour-and-15-minute chat, just before her exhibition’s opening. The high ceilings juxtaposed with the main attraction in the centre of the room exuded a peculiarity I hadn’t expected yet made total sense, as Jacobs encouraged me to interact with the felt sculpture. Drawing on her family history and values, Jacobs emphasised during both our interactions that this work was about the “traces of what has come before”.

My selfish interest in seeing her work, live, was rooted in this very intimate interaction she has with the raw material. She speaks passionately about the relationship between the landscape she grew up in and the materiality of her felt sculpture during our catch-up call, a day after the exhibition ended. “Most of the work in ‘Enfold’ has this underbelly of rawness,” says Jacobs, describing the moment of discovery in how the work complements her design background. The marrying of her charcoal drawings and the felt sculpture reflects deeply on the land of her forebears. With her family having worked the land for six generations, the Jacobs touch has rubbed off on her through art — her method of felting the material is also a process that can only be done in a reflective mode, indicating both the harshness and the delicate site from which her work stems.

A fine arts graduate from Stellenbosch University, she started out as a designer, running her own bespoke furniture design brand, Jacobs Collection, which was named best stand at 100% Design South Africa in 2019 and recognised as an emerging creative at Design Indaba the same year. This turn to fine art is significant for Jacobs in the sense that it would have not happened if she hadn’t been open to her process and story. “It's a trial-and-error base,” convincing me to think of fine art and design as inseparable. In retrospect, the time Jacobs spent on the charcoal drawings and the sculptural felt piece adds to her repertoire as an artiste, as one imagines the movements of her fingers and hands, felting the wool and marking it with a needle to render traces of the landscape she has grown to understand so intuitively.

The process of felting is one that requires patience and, importantly, technique. Jacobs creates an immersive experience, juxtaposing the exterior, creamy white woollen texture with a felted brown interior, much like the vast grounds of her family's Free State farm, full of Merino sheep. The functional felt sculpture, outstretched on the floor of the exhibition space, softens the gaze, emulating the hands, the landscape, and the creativity of those who contributed to its making —Jacobs's father, the farm workers, and the artist herself.

An extraordinary component of the Jacobs exhibition is a nude shot of my homie coiled up in the rough wilderness. The drone photograph, printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, draws the viewer inward to the land surrounding her, in addition to the vastness of the landscape. In examining Jacobs's body of work from an ecological standpoint, she is ultimately highlighting the Anthropocene and how blissfully ignorant humans have been in this precarious period of climate change.

One of the major factors affecting farmers in 2023 has been veld fires and, in the Free State, North West, Western Cape and parts of KwaZulu-Natal, one of the issues has been the dearth of rain, leading to loss of land and livestock. “Fire burns the landscape, it touches the whole community,” she says.

In her body of work, one is able to connect the story of where and how it began for Jacobs. “My work holds this possibility of regeneration and growth,” Jacobs says as we end our conversation on a high note, excited about how our birth province, the Free State, has been so influential in our uncovering of our personal histories.