Profile: Mary Sibande
In embracing her alter ego, artist Mary Sibande has found a fantastical way to pay homage to her female forebears.
When Mary Sibande finished school in Barberton, Mpumalanga, her dream was to become a fashion designer, but she didn’t apply for the course on time, and ended up graduating with BTech (Hons) in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg. For her first solo show, held recently at Gallery MOMO, she combined both passions while threading a poignant tale around the history of the women of her family. Long Live the Dead Queen was a collection of fantasies and imagined narratives revolving around a character called Sophie, who is a maid.
Inspired by the explorations of race, gender and sexuality in the work of American artists Kara Walker and Cindy Sherman, and London-based Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, Mary cast her own body in fibreglass and silicone to create Sophie. She then painted her a ‘flat black’, so that she stands out like a dark and static shadow, haunting and daunting all at once, a strangely beautiful alter ego. Sophie’s large-scale and dominant presence erases any trace of servility, subtly subverting the master/servant binary.
Sophie’s eyes are always closed as if in a ‘constant ecstasy of fantasy’ and it is in her mind that her dress becomes a thing of voluminous Victorian splendour. ‘If she opened her eyes, it would be back to work – cleaning this, dusting that. Her dress would become an ordinary maid’s uniform,’ says Mary, who works in her studio at August House on the western edge of downtown Joburg, in the company of fellow artists Nicholas Hlobo, Gordon Froud, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and her partner, Lawrence Lemaoana.
‘Both my great grandmother and my grandmother were maids, and my mother worked as a part-time maid every afternoon after school until she finished high school,’ says Mary. She recalls, as a little girl, visiting the house where her grandmother worked. ‘I’m still not sure whether that house really was so huge, but in my mind it was massive. There were toys everywhere and I remember eating a polony sandwich and it being so nice… It was like never-never land. I couldn’t believe that a place like that really existed.’
It was this otherworldly life of the imagination that gave rise to Sophie, ‘who spends her days wishing she could have all the things her madam has’. ‘I didn’t want her to be an ordinary maid, I wanted her to realise her objects of desire. When I showed Sophie to my grandmother, she had tears of joy in her eyes,’ says Mary, quietly acknowledging that she’s the first woman in her family to be able to live her dreams.
Text: Alex Dodd.
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