Part I — Liminal Layers of Light with Frances van Hasselt

Q. JENNY LUNDGREN: I’ve been really inspired by some of the images you shared in our chat - especially a photo of a wall with a beautiful and intriguing shade of turquoise, but also by the warm light present in several of your landscape photos. Have you been inspired by anything from our chat or by the expression of our works, or anything else related to our communication regarding the exhibition?

 

 

A. FRANCES VAN HASSELT: I have being incredibly inspired by our shared love for colour, abstraction of light and trying to map three very different landscapes into a body of work that are clearly distinguishable and yet so perfectly familiar to each other it almost feels like we shared a studio.

 

Jenny your intuition and unashamed trust in working from feel. There are so few moments of authenticity and rawness in human mark making today that this is a rare gift and one that I feel we will never tire of witnessing.  

 

Our tapestries unfold as we make; working from land and material-up instead of a predetermined collection-down. It was hugely humbling and helpful for all of us in the studio to play as we passed the fibre through all the stages of making. There is so much freedom and joy to this approach. I remember the very first piece we made for the show and sending you both an image of ‘Moonlight Sleeping on a Rusted Lake’ and asking your thoughts – where the colours too intense, would this complement your work?. The response was to continue making whatever, however feels right and that you were both certainly not making by waiting or thinking about if this would fit into the others work.  Your replies set me free. 

 

Caroline’s thought-out consideration and commitment to form and composition on the other hand has been such a lesson in making sure that the markings we make are in keeping with the intention and evocative of feel. 

 

Our conversations have shifted my way of looking– sharing images, vulnerabilities, process and details of our lives has made me notice tiny fragments with a renewed intrigue in figuring out how to capture this in our work. This has led us to new techniques in order to play with the concept of light and how its interaction with different mediums and materiality can have a common language but a certainly a different dialect. 

 

Jenny, the fact that seasons are so impactful on your work made me notice light more and think about creating without sunshine (a very foreign concept to me) but it has been such a brilliant practice. 

 

Caroline, your sense of place and thought for how every aspect of the show made us create pieces we would never have made had we not had a specific physical space and intention of translucency in mind. 

 

‘Layered Landscape of Blooms in Karoo’ was this piece. Created to shift and change constantly as the light moves. The finest spiderweb of a weave. A mirage of pink in direct sunshine, soft and cocooning in the afternoon breeze, and when the light falls just right you are unable to stay focussed on the piece in its entirety because the glimmers of light that fall through the weave showcases all the details of the warp, the weft, the yarn, the mood of the weaver at that particular line (is she beating down with meaning, or daydreaming whilst listening to a story about a church bazaar in Klaarstroom on the radio). The hand-worked stitch lines moving the tapestry from a liquid watercolour into a thick oil plaining of blooms. The light showcasing the detail of the making process. 

 

Our conversations have been a tonic, full of kindness, encouragement, and humility. I hope our postcards in some way convey the ease and joy in which these conversations took place, the difference in all of our styles.  A yet together they pull on that invisible, umbilical cord that connects us to each other, nature and mystery - women’s work.  

A. FRANCES VAN HASSELT: Living in this semi-arid landscape, where nature is the defining element, it informs every aspect of our daily lives and of course what, and how, we create. Nature’s effortless tactility, colouring and composition remains the best  teacher. With the greatest lesson, and one most challenging to achieve, being that of simplicity. 

 

The Karoo strips one back to what I call the ‘mesmerisingly simple’. Here there is nothing to distract you from noticing the scorch of the midday sun, the slow relief of an evening breeze and the impossible quest of a Dung Beetle pushing life’s shit into a treasured ball of soul-defying importance. The Karoo humbles, making you feel tiny in its antiquity and yet it generously offers up a blank canvas in which you can translate what you feel into shares and forms and forms that only you can image.  

 

This feeling of being ‘tiny’, is matched with a sense of enormous privilege and ‘bigness’ in that you know you are the only person in the world who has noticed a tiny pop of purple in a passing desert plant. You look again and the light has shifted, and everything has returned to a ‘nothing-to-see-here dull’. A moment so small yet mesmerising in its simplicity. 

 

There is nothing more moreish than Karoo light; stark, then suddenly flat and washed-out, and just when you think you can turn your back it turns on that thick, buttery, gooey, glowy, luminous evening light. 

 

The light, what it touches and what you notice has always been a starting point from which I create and start to think about space, form and subject. The long shadows of dusk and the way light turns dusty plains into a great lake of liquid gold makes me stop every day. Light makes me constantly assess and reimagine daily happenings; the details of dry twigs and rock formations that only hours earlier where seemingly dead and flat, now reveal all the intricacy of layered time trappings that find their home in the belly of this fossilised seabed. 

 

Titles for me are really important since all our pieces are textile stories of this place, her history, its people and our own personal relationships with tortoises and mountain folds. It’s a way to invite an outside viewer into our everyday; the language, the process of making, and the hopefully allows you to see past the warp and the weft into a much more intricate tapestry of place and practice. 

 

‘Postcards of Home’ for example  is a piece made mainly from raw, kid mohair which is hand-spun and hand-woven. Since mohair is endemic to the Karoo the fibre reflects the landscape from which it originates; holding light, colour, texture, lustre and character effortlessly. The raw, natural material combined with hand-spinning results in every section of the yarn being irregular. Like the Karoo, which many may see as vast and washed-out, a simple space, when you spend time and start seeing in micro you notice the layers of sophistication in every tiny detail. The fibre, yarn and weave in this piece starts looking like a hand-written text of home; capturing the fibre of animals, droplets of rain, the heat, the hands and thoughts of its makers. The simple joy we find in the in-and-out motion of darning our realities into these raw, nonsensical, textile roadmaps of where we have come from, and how we wish to tread into tomorrow. 

 

In contrast, ‘Very Leggy Darling’, is a total hoot. She goes to town every Wednesday and best everyone know she’s arrived. She never leaves without seeing Mildred (who has way too many children, and always looks heavily overwhelmed). Mildred needs Very Leggy Darling, and Very Leggy is delighted to add ‘shhh the children’  to her Wednesday to-do-list. Life can be so sandy if you don’t make time for flare.