Mandy Johnston wants to burn things to bring back traditions
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
If you have been to the supermarket lately and found shelves mysteriously missing steel wool, I can explain. It was Mandy Johnston. She bought every roll of steel wool. To burn it. Okay, okay, maybe I am exaggerating a bit. Let me rewind. Johnston is a South African artist. She has an exhibition, titled Gatherer, on at the Berman Contemporary All Women Art Gallery, V&A Waterfront, in Cape Town. Where does the steel wool fit in? “Steel wool, for me, is like a commentary on the fact that we construct these man-made things that seem so strong and so formalised. Steel is one of the hardest substances on Earth but in another form it’s so fragile and can burn,” said Johnston, a few days before the exhibition’s opening on Thursday, 28 May. At the opening, selected human-form wireframe sculptures, including dog sculptures, were set alight, their steel wool surfaces erupted into orange sparks before collapsing to the floor. It was beautiful to watch the one-off component of the exhibition. I am not sure if Johnston will be recasting the sculptures in steel wool to reburn them for another audience. When I asked, it was a firm “no”. Videos of the burn do exist. Art buyers then buy the burnt remaining frames/sculptures. Aside, I knew Johnston’s work and it hit me that her first work I encountered was at this year’s Cape Town Art Fair, where I called her beautiful burnt wood sculpture an anorexic Jackson Hlongwane sculpture. I have been a fan ever since. Those who have been to AfrikaBurn might have seen her Burning Man Sculpture too. These are works of art to admire, really. Along the walls of the new exhibition are some visually appealing black landscape paintings. I later learnt that they were not paintings in the traditional sense of the word but rather ash from the sculpture burns. The remnants have been reincorporated into paintings and titled Earth Meets Ash. The surfaces are smoky and mineral-rich, suspended somewhere between landscape and memory. They resemble scar