Cape Town An Illustrated Poem
by Julia Grey
Cape Town, an illustrated poem is a full colour art journal; part travelogue and part personal manifesto involving collage, illustrations and poetry. It is a work of self-discovery; documenting the impressions, visuals, questions and growing pains of a young person coming of age during the South African transition.
The sheer effort, and Greys attention to detail, the reinvesting of the magical in the most ordinary, appealed to me on such an intrinsic level. If nothing else, I was inspired alone by the force of love behind such a project. If the post-apartheid state creates that tenuous space, where every reckoning of `home is found to be problematic at one or another discursive level, then surely it is the most noble of hearts that seek out this precarious ground all the same, in the spirit of creating something good. While Grey employs poetry, the expression of metaphor, to pay tribute to the complex Cape Town, she simultaneously recognizes the potential lack in language, those areas where a thing is beyond the definition of words. Thus, instead of making a `closed space of her imagined home, Greys use of quilt-like collage serves rather to open up the city spaces. . Hers is a work undeniably multiplicitous in spirit as it `quilts together pages of beading, Greys own watercolour renderings of the citys landscapes, maps, photographs, lace and ribbons, scraps of upholstery and other fabrics (such as ones of local South African prints), buttons, heavy stitching in bright cottons, the dried leaves and flowers of indigenous plants, feathers, bits of wallpaper, and tokens of everyday life such as RoopkiPane Bindis, Lion matches famous yellow paper, and Rajah Curry Powder packaging, postcards and plane tickets. At the books end, on the writers blurb, is a photograph of the artist-at-work, cross-legged and armed with a pair of scissors before scattered fragments of the early work, a scrapping of telephone book proportions. Jocelyn Teri Fryer (NMM University masters dissertation
Publisher: Struik Publishers
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Soft cover
Book Condition: Very good
Dust Jacket Condition: No jacket as published
Edition: First
Pages: 94
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