Woven Legacies: Innovation & Tradition
Timed Online Auction, 2 - 24 February 2025
Innovation & Tradition
About the Session‘Woven Legacies: Innovation & Tradition’ highlights a diverse range of materials, techniques, and processes from various regions, including Southern, Central and Western Africa. These works coalesce utility, aesthetics and cultural identity. From the tactile threads of textiles to the intricate blending of natural fibres in baskets and the sculptural forms of steel, copper, brass and beads, the concept of weaving is reimagined as a metaphor for connection, storytelling and the passing on of tradition.
About this Item
Notes
Mgongo Ngubane is one of the most active artist’s at the Mdukatshani Trust and has quite a knack for weaving bowls. With an innate sense of style, Ngubane could be a stonemason with his wonderful sense of rhythm and rock. As a young boy his father was killed in Johannesburg. So, early on, Ngubane was always one of the ‘men’, a little boy who tagged along with older guys. Born in 1984, he’s never been to school, and despite his hunger for learning, literacy classes in Mdukatshani never last long.
- Text adapted from correspondence between the Mdukatshani Trust and JMFA, 2011.
The Threads of Africa Project, a collaboration with the Mdukatshani Development Trust, based in the Thukela Valley of KwaZulu Natal. The project aims to promote the centuries-old African practice of metal work in a contemporary context - giving light to the painstaking art of basket weaving with metals. As put by David John Moon 'an experienced weaver may progress less than one centimetre a day, depending on the intricacy of the design and the size of the bowl. The correct tension is vital to ensure balance and proportion, and is complicated by the fact that each metal has a different density, even if the wire is the same thickness.' 1
1 David John Moon, (2011) The Earth is Watching Us: Threads of Africa, page 11.
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