Abstract
Abstract : This study investigates the tapestry practice initiated by two Swedish artists, Peder and Ulla Gowenius, at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in apartheid South Africa. Following an experimental period at Ceza Mission Hospital in early 1962, and the opening of a craft-therapy project at Umpumulo, the couple established an ambitious weavery at Rorke’s Drift in 1963, which they and their Swedish successors ran until early 1976. Despite the Centre’s popular acclaim, little is known of the Swedish context in which this philanthropic gesture was launched, or the works made by the recipients of their largesse, who were rural isiZulu-speaking women marginalised by apartheid policy, missionary strictures and social convention. In uncovering the context in which a group of Swedish women, the Svenska kommittén för stöd åt afrikanskt konsthantverk (Swedish Committee for the Support of African Art and Craft), imagined a poverty-alleviation project in Africa, I reveal how their notions of ‘rescuing’ vernacular African crafts would prove unworkable, particularly in the light of the apartheid Government’s strategy to tribalise Africans by limiting their access to industrial technologies and promoting ‘native craft’ instead. The pilot project at Ceza and then Umpumulo was an alternative solution that combined inherited and imported technologies, developed through the agency, interaction and adaptation on the part of both the empowered ‘experts’ and the recipients of their knowledge, learnings which would be applied in the new weavery at Rorke’s Drift. Close examination of the tapestries women made there, and the way they worked, challenges homogenising representations of these textile artists as lacking subjectivity and individuality, and reveals how they developed new visual syntaxes through the ‘free weaving’ approach, in which imagery was improvised on the loom. By examining the pedagogic approaches of successive Swedish teachers, I also uncover tensions in the practice between modernist concepts of ‘originality’ and the demands of production. The measures the teachers took to deal with this, and to infuse the weavery with new visual concepts that would appeal to the Swedish market, are closely considered in this study, as are the challenges African women at times mounted to their mentors’ modus operandi. As well as an income-generating project, however, Swedish mentors developed the weavery as a site for artistic education, encouraging women’s independence and critical thinking in a complex environment. Reference to apartheid policy, Lutheran agendas and social practices can be read in number of tapestries. Despite the systems of control that determined weaver’s lives, some of their iconographies ignored restrictions on inherited African practices in the interests of artistic experience. In navigating patriarchy at the Centre, weavers sometimes endorsed men’s ‘authority’ in the tapestries they improvised from their linocuts, while at other times they personalised them. But their most innovative iconographies were drawn from women’s oral knowledge, often articulating covert references to the social and political regimes that defined their lives. This new reading of the tapestry practice at Rorke’s Drift uncovers the role of the loom in the resilience and agencies of marginalised women.
Ph.D. (Art History)