Creatures of Home series

Abstract

Creatures of Home (2020) consists of eight framed pen and ink portrait drawings of my childhood dogs, dressed in human clothing and posing against patterned backgrounds. The backgrounds are drawn digitally with the Photoshop Liquify tool and present camouflaged plant and wildlife imagery observable in-between curved lines. It was exhibited as part of “Diaspora: Dispersed Artists of the Lowveld,” a group exhibition presented at White River Gallery. The exhibition aimed to address questions about how place defines us and how memories extend awareness of one’s present environment, which connects with South Africans’ diffusion through urbanisation, especially during the current economic crisis. White River Gallery showcases artworks relating to cultural history and contemporary South African topics, including artworks that portray the social and political climates of Mpumalanga.

In Creatures of Home, recollections of Lowveld plant- and wildlife as observed in the Kruger National Park (KNP) merge with memories of my pet dogs, which two elements portray home. The latter signify my parental home on a farm near the KNP and the first refer to experiences in nature. The dogs embody safety, belonging, as well as familiarity and the KNP exemplifies territoriality and nature. Both aspects remind of home, depicting a place of safety, belonging, and exquisiteness. Creatures of Home captures the geographers David Seamon’s (1979) and Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) notion that home can be a midpoint of expressive meaning, familiarity, and belonging.

I am a dispersed person, urbanised and removed from my childhood home, which is but a memory that creates a consciousness of my present city setting. My current dwelling is a place where I frequently experience isolation and even incarceration, especially for the duration of the COVID-19-lockdown, during which time I was also admitted to a hospital where I experienced and extended solitude. Bessel van der Kolk’s (1997:2) argument that memories are stored in, acted upon, and remembered within the brain were strengthened when I sketched my pets in the hospital. The artworks confirmed that events are most likely to be remembered as narratives that transform and fade over time.

The dogs and nature captured in Creatures of Home reverberate Irene Cieraad’s (1994) theory of the childhood home: “Memories of the childhood home remain a primal point of reference, whether one loved it or hated it.” The quirky presentation of the dogs dressed in playful attire echoes the contentment I experienced as a child and becomes a metaphor for a pleasurable and happy period in my life. It further depicts the eternal longing for those special moments, knowing that it can never be relived and, therefore, signifies the loss of my childhood home. By longing for my childhood home, I feel internal pain similarly to Freud’s (1917) melancholia, which is the loss of a love object experienced both consciously and unconsciously.

The naïve way in which the dogs are drawn is influenced by faux naïf art, with specific reference to the artworks of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, and reflects my inner world, which has developed since childhood. When a loss occurs, this inner world plunges into chaos. This is suggested through the muddled, child-like use of lines in the backgrounds of the drawings. The loss of my childhood home caused my identity to fracture, which relates to Godkin’s (1980) argument that some places provide “reflective foci” of meaning, which rest at the midpoint of a person’s logic and self-identity. Creatures of Home is an endeavour to keep memories alive by delving into childhood as well as an attempt to capture the KNP and my dogs the way I understood both during childhood.

Technical originality is achieved by combining digital and traditional drawing methods. The Liquify tool facilitates and eases automatic drawing, which unlocks my childhood memories. The child-like background images are produced by multiple overlapping layers and with free association. By pulling and dragging pixels using liquefication, images recalling elements from home spontaneously emerge from the unconscious. Through layering each artwork, a process of revelation transpires, which could be interpreted as layers of memories and the traces of the past being unlocked and excavated by using free association.