“Think of a television show,” she says. “At the beginning of the program, the exterior of a building is shown to set the scene. Once the setting is established, the next cut goes inside the building to find the unfolding story.”
This, Zangewa points out, is the way the narrative in her work ran as well. You have to know where you are before you can get to what’s going on inside. With the scene set by the architectural facades on the purses, Zangewa could move on to revealing what was going on inside those Johannesburg buildings and inside her life.
Just as there is beauty and ugliness in any city, the vagaries of relationships carry plenty of both nectar and bile. Emboldened by her handbag breakthrough, Zangewa soon found herself exploring those personal extremes in her work.
“I did a piece called Through the Lens. It was the first piece I did about love or romance. I met a guy and he seemed really nice but in the end he turned out to be something that I never expected I would attract. I was really upset about it because I was doing so much work on myself spiritually and emotionally. Asking the question ‘Why?’ really got me into a confusion. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t come up with the answer. I just picked up a piece of silk and started writing about what had happened. The first one was really just trying to come to terms with the fact that maybe there was no answer.”
Using embroidery cotton as a pen, Zangewa regularly transcribes actual passages from her journal – crossed-out lines and all – onto flat swatches of cloth. When combined with silken autobiographical scenes, the words hang like portentous clouds. Ringing with the biting sexual commentary of the painter Wangechi Mutu and the bracingly personal revelations of artist Tracy Emin, the tapestries are born out of a therapeutic process.
“I find it cathartic,” Zangewa says. “We’re always ashamed to talk about the disappointments in our lives. If somebody that we love betrays us, we don’t want to talk about it to people. We always want to make it seem like our lives are going really well. I like to think that I’m breaking that taboo. Somehow it makes me feel better. Then I don’t so feel ashamed, I don’t feel so hurt. I don’t feel so alone if I can just share it with people and say, ‘Here it is. I’m not ashamed of it. I have been disappointed and betrayed.’”
Garnering international attention and accolades for her work, Zangewa has traveled far from her Johannesburg home to make and display her art. All the while, she collects both new experiences and new materials – a trip to Paris’s Cirque d’hiver, a piece of turquoise silk, a ski trip, white sequins, etc. These personal moments of discovery are what inform the art.
Zangewa’s work, in its unwavering honesty to her life experiences, says more about the issues women face than most work that is explicitly politically driven. Now that she is internationally recognized and considered a vital emerging artist, her art school professors may want to reconsider their stance on feminine art.
– Buck Austin