#an_uncomplicatedcurator
My goal
To encourage an awareness that artwork needn’t be new to have a present-day impact.
Please contact me for more info.
How has this idea evolved?
From 2022 to 2024, I lived
in the UK. There I realised that artists everywhere face similar complex exhibiting
challenges – the stress and expense of creating new work, high exhibiting costs,
and in general, a weak art market with poor sales which sometimes leaves an artist out of
pocket.
Also, many exhibition
writings, in what Grayson Perry calls 'International Art English', often only serve
to create a veil of confusion that alienates the viewer from the
artwork.
On my return I realised that I must use my SA artworld network and editing/writing skills to assist local artists in building up their exhibiting profiles in an uncomplicated way. Inviting artists to exhibit their earlier works within a fresh and contemporary context takes away the pressure of conceiving a theme and the costs of making new work.
And so, in January 2025, I began a new project as #an_uncomplicatedcurator.
2026!
UPCOMING 18 - 19 April 2026: STILL WATERS RUN DEEP
Prints by Emma Willemse and Photographs by Rudolph Willemse.
05 - 08 February 2026: OLD FRIENDS
I began 2026 with a small retrospective of my own work, created between 2005 and 2021. Two of the series were exhibited at the original Gordart Gallery (Melville) in 2005 and 2007 - hence the exhibition title Old Friends.
In 2025, I curated 6 exhibitions:
13 - 14 September 2025: SHE WOULD LIKE THIS
This exhibition showcased the creative life of my dear late friend Monique Rudman van Rooyen. The works were selected from over a 30-year period, from her student days until her last works. The main feature was her iconic suite The seven deadly sins.
16 - 17 August 2025: AGENCY OF OBJECTS
This exhibition comprised the works created by Gwenneth Miller during an art residency in Paris at the beginning of 2025. We are so used to seeing exhibitions of fully resolved artworks, so it’s fascinating when an artist shares her process work, as well as her finished artworks, within the formal structure of an art gallery.
02 - 03 August 2025: MAPPING A LANDSCAPE
Like many artists today, Laurel Holmes and Yolanda Warnich are each concerned with how our country’s rich natural environments are being slowly eroded by human encroachment by exploring the physical essence of experiencing the physical land. Both artists are Cape-based but have been working quite independently of each other. It is fascinating how each has dealt creatively with this issue in different ways. Yolanda is interested in preserving her memories of her natural environment as a protection against her own eco-grief. Laurel uses the natural subjects around her as metaphors for something more philosophical - personal yet universal - of how fragments picked up from the natural world can both provoke memories of specific times in now lost places and provide solace and healing.
05 - 06 July 2025: FRAGMENTS OF FUTURE PAST
Keith Makombora speaks about experience of having separate masks for his different life situations: he is the person he is, but acts one way within his traditional family, another with his urban friends, another at his sophisticated place of work, and even other ways in other situations, often needing to switch them quickly. He said that sometimes he feels as though he is always changing masks. The daily putting on of different masks is a topic he is currently exploring in these artworks. Similarly, the environments that he exists in shift from situation to situation. He has a fascination with ancient and contemporary aspects of the African rural and urban creative environments, and having lived in Zimbabwe, his formal influences include the classical Shona stone sculptures and the colours and cave paintings of Southern Africa.
04 - 05 May 2025: RETRO PRINT SALE
We’ve all heard of ‘retro’ fashions and trends – from clothing and accessories to décor – sometimes newly made items that imitate styles from the past. But the concept of retro also embraces the real thing – the act of looking back at the actual item. This show features prints created between 1998 and 2000, and most of the artists are unknown to us today in South Africa. Unexpectedly, this can make viewing such an exhibition an enriching experience, in that it no longer matters who the artist is, but rather our own unique response to the image becomes important. And here, despite their vintage, many of the prints still seem so contemporary in their imagery.
20 - 24 March 2025: BITS OF JOZI
Jozi has always been about random bits and pieces. This aspect of the city triggered the concept and the title for this exhibition, as well as my choice of Allison Klein and Colleen Alborough as the featured artists. They have both used a variety of elements of collage to create the works exhibited here, although in completely different ways. Interestingly, David Hockney created a series of photo collages in the 1980s. He emphasised that that the fragmented nature of the collage process replicates the human perception of our surroundings better: that “fragmenting a scene into several pieces [achieves] a result that is more similar to how the eye works instead of viewing a single-shot photograph of a scene.”
experience _ my story
2018 - 2025 I was a member of The Printing Girls (TPG) - a network of South African female artist/printmakers. The artists range from emerging to professionals, as well as master printmakers. Key to the TPG ethos is that all members receive equal opportunities under their umbrella. Ongoing, TPG organises and curates themed exhibitions of original prints by its members. In 2021 was on the admin team of TPG. That year I co-curated four exhibitions and organised three print exchanges.
2018 - 2020 I assisted Sharon Sampson in running FAP (The South African Fine Art Print Fair).
2013 - 2018 I was a co-founder and the director of outoftheCUBE, one of the first purely virtual art galleries in SA.
This project ran for five years and introduced online solo exhibitions by artists whose work interested us. We grouped specific exhibitions thematically supported by a curator's statement. On closing, the site contained almost 90 full online exhibitions.
1993 – 2013 I worked as an art consultant in the South African art world - my specialist field of interest lay in our country's contemporary original prints.
I promoted and marketed prints for The Caversham Press, and later also for The Artist's Press, and Tim's Print Studio (Tim Foulds).
Curating projects
2021 The Printing Girls (TPG)
I co-curated the following exhibitions
October TPG@ SA Print Gallery at The South African Print Gallery, Cape Town
August Mother Nature in Monotype at White River Gallery, Mpumalanga
August #TPG21 at The Art Room, Johannesburg
March
New Girls on the Block at the Pretoria
Arts Association
and organised three print exchanges
August The Daphne Project
July Eco-longing
February #TPG First Print Exchange
2020 Aspire Art Auctions
I curated the auction ASPIRE X Caversham: 30 Years in 90 Lots consisting of 90 original art prints from The Caversham Press (KZN) at Aspire Art Auctions (Johannesburg)
2015 The Grenchen Print Triennale
I was invited to organise and curate an exhibition of around 100 South African prints for the Swiss-based Grenchen Print Triennial as their 2015 International Exhibition.
The prints were selected from five professional printmaking studios and two independent printmaker/artists, creating the exhibition South African Art Prints.
On its return from Switzerland, it was exhibited at Warren Studios in Cape Town under the title There and Back/South African Art Prints.
2013 - 2018 outoftheCUBE
Throughout its duration, outoftheCUBE presented almost 90 online solo exhibitions grouped thematically. We also participated in five art fairs as a gallery and curated three 'real-life' exhibitions, all of which featured its online artists.
