Her latest solo re-weaving m/other at Origins Centre, at the University of the Witwatersrand, includes a four-week series of fascinating conversations titled 'Creative Gatherings', with speakers' panels that represent the diversity of South Africa's art world. The talks are all free to attend but booking is essential. Secure your place by emailing Tammy.Hodgskiss@wits.ac.za
So far, the Creative Gatherings that Butkow’s exhibition has yielded have been insightful, engaging and essential for all women, whether you’re an artist, art lover or mother.
Creatives from all around the globe have provided us with the necessary information needed to understand the role of women in our ever-increasing community. On international grounds, Weiwei Wang at Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile spoke to us about using the vocabulary of “soft material” as a collective term for the medium used by (mostly) women artists, instead of “textile” for example, since the mixed media used in installations is far reaching.
Participants even got a comment from Butkow’s mother who sat in the audience for Gathering 1. She dove into the aspect of viewers as participants as oppose to voyeurs of the work since there is a visceral response to these works. The reciprocal engagement between the subject matter and the person immersed in it proves that the “viewer” is as important as the artist and artwork because, without us, there is no somatic response to a body of work that relies on the connection felt.
From neuroscience proving the worth of art as therapy to mothers creating mammoth installations influenced by baby teeth, inspiration is the least you get from her exceptionally curated Creative Gatherings. There are still two more talks left of the series and we highly recommending them, if not in person, then certainly online.
The notions of care, materiality and excess animate Butkow’s newest body of work, all with a view of what kinds of traces humanity is leaving on the world. “Underlying my making process is a deep awareness of responsibilities that come with making material objects,” explains Butkow. “What ethical, moral and material responsibilities do I have to the traces that I leave? How do I walk upon this Earth?”
re-weaving m/other sees the artist working intuitively with her materials – dressmaking scraps, artificial pearls, beads, textile offcuts, plastic jewels, masking tape and other mass-produced, synthetic items – to produce abstracted woven, stitched, printed, painted and mixed-media works.
The exhibition will also be activated by a series of four themed talks titled 'Creative Gatherings', at the Origins Centre.
The gatherings will engage a diverse group of artist-women, academics and thinkers from the Global South, and serve to provoke, question, and reframe how women exist in the world as individuals, in community, and in relation to all other living beings.
Gathering 1 – The body and art – Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 16:00 – 18:00.
The first talk explores action, gesture and the knowing bodies of both maker and viewer, by considering dialogues that occur somatically within both the creative process and the encounter with an artwork.
Presenters:
Keynote address – Buhlebezwe Siwani
Prompter – Katherine Dewar
Speakers – Shanti Govender, Dr Jenni Lauwrens, Fatima Tayob Moosa, Dr Kirti Ranchod
Gathering 2 – A material uprising – Wed, Sep 6, 2023, 16:00 – 18:00.
Here, the discussion centres on how materials ‘speak’ by exploring the intimate, symbiotic, synchronistic and receptive relationships that artists have with their materials.
Presenters:
Keynote address – Weiwei Wang
Prompter – Tracy Murinik
Speakers – Kutlwano Monyai, Hannelie Coetzee, Dr Adelheid Frackiewicz, Bev Butkow
Composite image by Johannesburg In Your Pocket. Photo of Hannelie Coetzee by Joshua Michael.
Gathering 3 – The value of women’s labour – Tue, Sept 12, 2023, 16:00 – 18:00.
This talk considers the burden of care on artist-women/artist-mothers, while simultaneously foregrounding care as a guiding philosophy of the creative process and of a re-visioned world.
Presenters:
Keynote address – Grace Cross
Prompter – Lara Koseff
Speakers – Mary Corrigall, Philiswa Lilla, Princia Matungulu, Nina Barnett
Gathering 4 – Traces we leave upon the Earth – Thu, Sep 14, 2023 (online only), 16:00 – 18:00.
The fourth and final talk asks that we think deeply about our impact – materially, socially, environmentally and otherwise – on each other and Mother Earth in the age of the Anthropocene. What ethical, moral and material responsibilities do we have to the traces that we leave? How do we walk upon this Earth?
Presenters:
Keynote address – Zayaan Khan
Prompter – Candice Allison
Speakers – Dr Jessica Webster, Io Makandal, Miliswa Ndziba, Day Mthembu, Dr Meghan Judge
The gatherings are free, but booking is essential – RSVP Tammy.Hodgskiss@wits.ac.za
