Inspirations | 107

First published in Inspirations issue #107 in July 2020, written by Ansie van der Walt

‘I am fascinated by the idea that flowers can be seen as a language of sorts and that they can be used as symbols for emotions or a code. Inspired by code, I learned about the Voynich Manuscript which in turn inspired me to embroider real as well as imaginary flowers.’

Hannalie Taute, an award winning South African artist working predominantly with embroidery on recycled rubber, is known to attend her exhibition openings dressed in fantasy costume that is an extension of the work on show. She doesn’t just make art, she becomes art.

Hannalie’s family moved around a lot when she was a child and she learned from a young age to enjoy her own company. ‘I had a happy childhood filled with play and fantasy. I could play with store bought toys as well as with mops, insects and dishcloths. I liked dressing up from a young age and would parade around the house in my mother’s clothes and high heels.’

It was during her rebellious teenage years while finding solace and an emotional outlet through music, that she also discovered her love of art. ‘I enjoyed heavy metal and hard rock. I used to copy the art on the CD covers, which usually contained a lot of skulls, in my diary.’ Hannalie’s father would not allow her to study fine art at university but compromised on Graphic Design. ‘During my first year, I secretly changed courses.’

Hannalie’s first recognition came in 2004 when she was chosen as one of the Top 100 Artists in a renowned national art competition for a series of toys constructed from plaster and found objects titled Madam choose your personality.

In 2011 she was nominated for a Fiesta Award for her exhibition Skeidingsangs/Separation anxiety at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK). ‘Looking back now I see this show as a retrospective of all the other mediums I used to use in my art practice, before rubber.’ After this she joined the Cape Craft and Design Council and started working with discarded inner tubes to make toy rhinos, giraffes and elephants. Hannalie donated a portion of the sales to an anti rhino-poaching fund.

‘It wasn’t until a friend asked me to add her daughter’s name onto a rubber toy that I had the idea of embroidering on the rubber…’

It was only two years later in 2013 when her ground-breaking exhibition titled Rubber Ever After won the Kanna Award for best visual arts exhibition at the KKNK. This opened a lot of doors for her in the art world. Hannalie works with discarded inner tubes from cars, trucks and tractors which she sources from local tyre shops. ‘My husband is a diesel mechanic for an earth moving company, so whereas other husbands bring their wives flowers, he brings me inner tubes from earth moving vehicles.’

Contradiction and dichotomies are evident throughout Hannalie’s work. It starts with the concept of embroidered flowers on rubber then moves on to physical opposites like masculine/feminine, dark/light, industrial/natural, before it continues to include abstract concepts like self/other, life/death, human/divine, sacred/profane, pure/sullied. The list goes on… ‘I have a lot of conflicted feelings about the world we live in and sometimes those feelings extend to my work.’

Flowers, fairy tales, and play are themes that often recur in Hannalie’s work*. ‘I find joy in the process of stitching a variety of blooms on smaller pieces of rubber and then later arranging them in bouquet-like pieces. Almost like building a puzzle. And, of course, there is the contradiction of stitching flowers onto rubber, which I like.*’ It is also an ode to Hannalie’s late mother, to the carefree times in her childhood when her mother owned a florist shop.

Hannalie loves fairy tales and fables and finds a lot of inspiration in them. ‘I once read somewhere that fairy tales and horror prepare you to deal with death. I guess working with fairy tale themes and subverting them makes me able to cope with reality. I also stitch a lot of hybrid figures and monsters. I am fascinated by monsters!’

Like most artists, Hannalie has a personal relationship with her tools. ‘I have one needle that I prefer working with, but I don’t know the make or where I bought it and if I lose it, I will be distraught. I do have other needles as back up, but none of them are the exact length with the big eye that I prefer.’ Hannalie uses DMC floss only for small pieces. The bigger pieces are stitched with a variety of threads and yarns.

‘I only use one type of stitch since rubber really doesn’t allow for dainty, fancy stitches. My stitches are sometimes intentionally imperfect and messy.’

Hannalie has mastered the language of flowers and is using it to tell her own fairy tales, to create her own hybrid creatures and imaginary monsters. Her rubber canvas, black by default, highlights the drama and contrasts she depicts in her work, but at heart, Hannalie Taute is just playing. This time not with a mop or a dishcloth, but with discarded rubber, colourful threads and her beloved needle.

Website: https://hannalietaute.com/

First published in Inspirations issue #107 in July 2020, written by Ansie van der Walt

Dijanne Devaal’s travelling blankets are perfect metaphors for her life – a collection of places, people, relationships, and experiences collected on her journey through life.

Born in the Netherlands, Dijanne grew up in Australia. ‘My father came home one day when I was nine years old and said to my mother, ‘we are immigrating. It is Australia or Brazil.’ She chose Australia. ‘I was bereft, I didn’t want to leave, they had promised me speed skates for my tenth birthday!’

Now Australian, Dijanne is still very aware of her Dutch cultural heritage. She also has French and possibly Catalan heritage, from the times of various religious wars in the 1600s. The first year in Australia was difficult. As a ten-year-old who couldn’t speak English, life in a small town was lonely. ‘I was teased a lot and was basically an outsider – it taught me to be resourceful on my own. I read voraciously in order to learn English. I like to spend time on my own – I need it to do research and think about what I am making. I think those early years in Australia taught me to be happy with my own company and to search and keep on searching.’

Dijanne’s textile skills and knowledge were collected in the same way as her travelling blanket memories – bit by bit, and piece by piece, from her mother who sewed and knitted for the family, to her artistic aunt and uncle, to her own self-taught knitting, embroidery and quilting endeavours.

‘As a bright child from a migrant family, it was expected that I would become a doctor. I asked my parents to allow me to study textiles, but the answer was a definite no.’

Dijanne ended up studying law and working as a solicitor for about ten years.

‘I came to quilting and stitching prior to a year’s travel to Africa and Europe. I felt I needed something to do with my hands whilst travelling and purchased a book by Pauline Burbidge. I made a quilt from the book, cut entirely by hand as I did not know about rotary cutters. I stitched it by hand but did the quilting by machine on my return.’ In 2000 Dijanne decided to formalise her textile knowledge and did a master’s degree in Visual and Performance Arts via distance learning at Charles Sturt University.

As a textile artist and traveller, Dijanne kept on collecting experiences and stories to add to her own life’s travelling blanket. One of these was her foray into curating. ‘I was frustrated that my work was not being selected for some of the bigger art quilt exhibitions – I wasn’t one of the names, but my work was selling. That gave me the confidence to float the idea of curating my own exhibition in France in 2000 – the Sydney Olympic year. Because it was the only travelling Australian exhibition in Europe that year, it created a lot of interest as every night there were segments about Australia on television.’

The exhibition was called Australian Bounty and had a very real aura about it, a presence that was hard to explain. It was invited to many venues. After that, Dijanne curated several other exhibitions, but hung up her curating boots in 2010, only to be drawn back into it with the Sentinelle series.

‘I work in themes because I want my work to tell a story. I always thought I will be a writer and have dabbled in it, but I find I am most comfortable making stories in fabric.’

The Sentinelle series was about Dijanne’s concern for the environment and the ideas of Australian indigenous people as guardians of the land. ‘I am in awe of their connection with the land, knowledge of that land and all things that grow on it. It seems to me to be very much the way forward as we grapple with environmental destruction on a scale never before encountered.’

‘The female form as an icon occurs in many cultures but is especially prevalent in my European heritage as angels and madonnas.’ Dijanne adopted this theme and made each sentinel about a different environmental concern. ‘They were the same height as me, to indicate that I also must take responsibility.’

‘I travel a lot. It satisfies my curiosity about the world and other people. I like being outside of language – not being able to speak the local language. I need to be extra observant to understand what is going on.’ Dijanne tends to go to one place at a time and really discover it by walking a lot just to observe.

Dijanne started her first blanket whilst she was travelling with an exhibition that she curated in 2001. ‘I was minding the exhibition for an entire event and needed something to do with my hands. The first piece was small, but I liked the idea and it grew bigger and continued out from there. I am always working on one these days as I find it stills the hectic pace, and somehow unwinds my mind into a gentler place.’

‘I never really plan a travelling blanket, but a few years ago I was asked to make and exhibit them for the Quilt and Craft Fair in Sydney and Melbourne in 2018. They wanted at least ten pieces – that was a lot of stitching.’ Normally Dijanne’s blankets are at least 150 cm along one side, but making ten pieces of that size, all hand-stitched, was just not possible within the time frame, so some of them ended up being smaller.

‘The pieces were inspired by places I had travelled to, such as Florence, India, France, East-Timor, and Australia. I don’t think I’ve ever stitched so much in my life – sometimes up to twelve hours a day just to get it finished in time. I love how they change under your hands – the feel of it changes, they change visually, and I like to keep them drapey as they are in a sense a tactile memory piece.’

‘Other than setting some sort of theme, they tend to grow organically. For example, a white and blue piece came about because I had forgotten to pack the piece I was working on at the time and the only fabric I had available was a natural coloured khadi fabric. I had remembered to pack threads, including some indigo threads that I dyed in India while visiting a friend. It just grew from there and as it grew it really became a reflection about my Dutch past.’

One of the other unique aspects of Dijanne’s travelling blanket of life is her use of hand-dyed fabric and linocut prints. As with everything else in life, they just showed up. ‘I work with Procion cold water reactive dyes and they are an integral part of my work. It is important for me to have and to create my own palette. I find that commercial fabric is dominated by trends and pattern that does not fit into what I create. If I need printed fabric, I make my own linocut and print my own fabric.’

Dijanne might not be a writer in the written-word sense, but she is a storyteller. Maybe it started way back when as a ten-year-old girl in a new country, she learned to live outside of language. She learned to observe, to sense and to interpret. And she learned to use her European heritage and her connection to her new land, to create her own palette, to stitch her own story. Her own travelling blanket.

Website: http://origidij.blogspot.com/

Instagram: @origidij