The Sensing, Knowing Hand:

Endorsing the proposition that drawing is phenomenological, this article presents an argument for hand drawing as a creative, communicative activity which contributes significantly to our awareness of being human. I argue that the specialised, trained human hand participates in an intense hand-eye-brain relationship. It intentionally draws signifying graphic marks to communicate information visually. When drawing for intaglio printing artists learn to handle new tools to draw and craft lines and tonal shapes on a rigid plate matrix. They engage in labour intensive technical processes and conscious reflection of the emergent image in order to create meaningful, aesthetic content. The printing processes deliver a limited edition of printed drawings. In modern and contemporary print practice the drawing is the artist’s original work. Specifically drawn to print original multiples rather than to exist as a single, autonomous statement, the drawing is not a printed reproduction of an existing drawing or painting. My examples are drawn from work that is little known in the West, namely intaglio printed drawings made at and published by The Caversham Press in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I analyse the drawing processes of two etchings and a drypoint to explain drawing and printing processes and I discuss the conceptual mind’s eye imaging that intersects with information from the physical eye, both of which contribute to decisions made by the brain informing the hand of required motor actions to create printed drawings

1986-1999: looking back at politics, art and young artists

Art is never free of the spirit of its time and place but although the weight of history and geopolitics haunts art objects, this does not control their identities. Looking back at the years 1986 -1999, when I served on the National Arts Festival Committee, the extraordinary pressures exerted on South African art reflect the society at large as it suffered the burden of apartheid, the fragile promise of a negotiated transition of political power, and then the upheavals of post-1994 social transformation. But looking at the exhibitions produced by Young Artist Award Winners for Visual Art, their interpretations of the complex South African situation produced remarkably creative and diverse responses. They proclaimed the power of the imagination to intervene with bleak reality and liberate the individual human spirit

On Reflection: spatial and metaphoric encounters with home and land, here and there, now and then

Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies is an extensive compendium of texts and images, combining scholarly, creative and critical writing on photography with new work in photography. The contributions to the compendium range from academic essays on fine art and documentary photographies to photo-essays, community-based and pedagogical photographic projects, personal testimonies, creative writing, activist interventions and accounts of participatory action research using photography. Home/Land is global in its reach, exploring women’s lives in Britain and other European nations, the United States, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia and Australia. Bringing together texts and images produced by an international group of feminist scholars, activists, artists and educators, the book demonstrates how women have used photographic practices to find places for themselves as citizens, denizens, exiles or guests, within or beyond the nation as currently conceived, and, in so doing, how they actively produce new and different forms of identity, community and belonging

Cutting anti-apartheid images: Bongiwe Dhlomo's activist linocut prints

This paper discusses political content in a series of linocut prints created by a female Zulu artist, Bongiwe (commonly known as Bongi) Dhlomo (b. 1956) in 1982 during late apartheid in South Africa. Deeply influenced by the 1976 Soweto uprising, Dhlomo decided to study art at Rorke’s Drift (The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Southern Africa’s Art and Craft Centre) and, on graduating, created images with political content. I explore her visual portrayal of the spatial politics resulting from apartheid ideology, and the policy of separate development. In order to establish ‘homelands’ for different ethnic groups, the Nationalist government undertook forced removals and relocated people, taking them from established communities to ‘historic’ places of origin. Focussing on Dhlomo’s ‘Removals’ series (1982) I consider her images as a spatial narrative about black South African experience and discuss the iconography of the seven ‘Removals’ prints, and the appropriateness of linocut as a process for personal commentary on the disruptive migrations experienced by millions of black South Africans. I argue that Dhlomo’s empathetic, representational rendering of the diasporic condition offers a record of historic events, avoids the didactic tone and stylistic mannerisms of much ‘protest art’ and ‘struggle politics’, and expresses deeply felt responses to South African life under apartheid

Here, there and in-between: South African women and the diasporic condition

This article focuses on diaspora within historical and contemporary South African society, specifically on the ways in which the diasporic condition has affected South African women. It analyses and discusses artworks by Marion Arnold, Louise Gubb, Bongiwe Dhlomo, and Berni Searle

The dark art of equivocation

The dark art of equivocatio

The combinatorics of open covers (II)

We continue to investigate various diagonalization properties for sequences of open covers of separable metrizable spaces introduced in Part I. These properties generalize classical ones of Rothberger, Menger, Hurewicz, and Gerlits-Nagy. In particular, we show that most of the properties introduced in Part I are indeed distinct. We characterize two of the new properties by showing that they are equivalent to saying all finite powers have one of the classical properties above (Hurewicz property in one case and in the Menger property in other). We consider for each property the smallest cardinality of metric space which fails to have that property. In each case this cardinal turns out to equal another well-known cardinal less than the continuum. We also disprove (in ZFC) a conjecture of Hurewicz which is analogous to the Borel conjecture. Finally, we answer several questions from Part I concerning partition properties of covers

Making oneself at home: a dialogue on women, culture, belonging and denizenship

The following text is derived from a presentation given as a dialogue to the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in London 2014, where our presentation was used to open the session. Our decision to perform an interactive, scripted dialogue against a background of images, was an intentional attempt to explore ‘art history’ in ways that do not conform to the accepted academic conference conventions of a formal paper, subsequently revised, extended and embellished with references and footnotes to locate the writing as serious ‘research’ designed for possible publication. Research is generated not only by planned research processes but by informal interactions such as conversation and correspondence. In these processes dialogue is generative: ideas are sketched out, emerge spontaneously in response to questions, or are snatched from insights stimulated by unexpected collisions of spoken or written words.1 Art history offers many examples of fruitful correspondence between thinkers and practitioners. E.H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell explored canons and values in 1979; John Berger corresponded with Leon Kossoff (1996) and with James Elkins (2003-4) about drawing.2 As academics engaged in teaching and research, we talk about our shared interests in feminist histories and theories and our experiences as women now based in Britain, but who lived lives elsewhere - in the United States (Marsha) and southern Africa (Marion). For us the personal has been political; there are commonalities and differences in our experiences of ‘home’ and re-location. In doing light editing (added footnotes) of our performed dialogue for publication, we maintained the dialogic framework to indicate that the two voices speak from their particular perspectives while also finding a shared space