There’s one standout work in Lady Skollie’s exhibition Groot Gat — which opened last week in Makhanda as part of the National Arts Festival — that predates the rest.
Last year, Lady Skollie (real name Laura Windvogel-Molefi) was named the 2022 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts, one of South Africa’s most prestigious art prizes. Part of that award was an exhibition that opens at the festival and then tours the country.
That standout work — LOOK DADDY! I’m a Snoek! — was made in 2021. Yet it was, in many ways, the starting point for the broader concept of her new exhibition.
It is, as Lady Skollie tells the FM, “a giant version of [a San] cave drawing” in wax crayon and ink depicting mermaids: not the “Ariel” kind, but ancient Bushman water spirits.
It was made in response to a TikTok video of a little coloured girl playing with a mermaid filter on a cellphone and seeing herself not as a mermaid, but as a snoek.
“Look Daddy! I’m a snoek!”, the little girl says in the video, while her father gently corrects her in the background.
Discussing this with the FM, Lady Skollie says: “Bushman culture and being brown is a very complex thing.”
She sees San, Khoi and Griqua heritage as part of her brown or coloured identity, and this complexity has much to do with the history and traditions that have been lost over the years.
“We are defined by not knowing,” she says. Or, as she elaborated in an earlier statement: “If you’re brown in South Africa, you have to deal with a big void, a hole, a gap, a forgetting within your own culture and within your own remembering. You’re defined by a hole in your own history.”
“It’s quite a frustrating thing to want to know more and not be able to even access it, or know where to look,” she says.
That TikTok video was memorable not only because of this, but also because it was, despite surfacing in “everyday pop culture”, an expression of a stubborn resistance to mainstream culture.
Lady Skollie recognises something of that in the little girl’s perception of herself — and, in response, draws a vivid, supersized depiction of a fragment of history depicting San water spirits that will forever allow her to see the image of herself as a mermaid.
While the rest of the artworks in Groot Gat are new (and, she says, will be added to, as the exhibition travels), Lady Skollie says that Look Daddy set off a train of thought — not least about heritage.
Her new exhibition takes Boesmansgat (Bushman’s Hole) in the Northern Cape as its starting point. Best known now as one of the world deepest freshwater cave-diving destinations, it, too, has a place in Bushman heritage.
As a void itself, it represents a site of loss and forgetting: a history that has been erased and overwritten. This exhibition imagines a world on the other side of that watery sinkhole where, as Lady Skollie says, “cave drawings are not faded or scratched or vandalised, but are giant and bright”.
She takes inspiration from 20th-century San artists such as Coex’ae Qgam (also known as Dada) and plays out the complex drama of imagination against loss.
Drawing on the spirit of the resistance she saw in the girl in the TikTok video, she dips into a “land of imagination” to create a counternarrative of other possibilities. “You take little bits and you figure it out for yourself,” she says. When you can’t retrieve history, something else has to fill the gap.
While some of these themes have run throughout Lady Skollie’s work over years, there’s a more introspective dimension to this exhibition. The Dada-inspired artist figure she depicts has more than a little of Lady Skollie herself in it. She half jokes that a prize of this significance brings with it something of an “existential crisis”.
“I am competitive and I like the concept of winning,” she says. “It’s a big deal for me.”
She says she’d had her eye on the Standard Bank award her whole career. But after she won, and was asked repeatedly what it meant to win the award, she realised “I don’t really know how to answer that”.
“I’ve only planned up until here,” she laughs.
As it was, the day before she was announced as the winner, she found out she was pregnant. So it’s clear that this period of her life has the markings of a major shift.
In this way, the artist figure in her exhibition is also an exploration of what an artist does, and what the role of an artist ought to be.
“I’ve been seeing myself in the work more than ever,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about transformation, and I was thinking a lot about how I perceive myself.”
In this sense, the cave represents a personal consideration of the role of the artist in a space that is also a void without answers, just as much as it is a wider contemplation of art, culture, history and identity. In Lady Skollie’s case, what emerges from this introspection will probably be just as powerful as the work that led to this award and exhibition in the first place.
Groot Gat is on at the Gallery in The Round at the Monument in Makhanda until July 2 as part of the National Arts Festival. After that it will exhibit at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and then travel around the country to other galleries, including the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Joburg.
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