Gcina Mhlophe

Gcina Mhlophe is one of the people who had a major influence upon me and many other poets and narrative writers. I was first exposed to her as a child through her radio stories which played every single Saturday morning, on UMhlombo Wenene. There are not many videos of her reading or telling her stories, but I have managed to get this one where she is reading from her one of her favorite books.  When listening to her, you cannot help but be captured by her animated way of story telling.  

Painted thoughts

Yesterday I was digging through some boxes I had left at my sister's place last year and I came across some painting I had roughly made a few years ago. They are not the original paintings, I had somehow lost them as a result constantly relocating, I sti need to remake them when I get the chance.

Self portrait  2015
The above painting is a remake of a painting I had made in 2008 based on a poem which was a written self portrait for Theory in the Augmented course. The original paintings look better since I had had done it over a period  unlike the remakes which I did over two days. Which is basically the same concept that I am currently doing, except that I am translating the poetry into jewellery instead of an actual painting. 

Holiday in a nutshell

Fabric

As I had mentioned in a previous post, a few month's back I dedicated my business, which is a Christian brand. Under the umbrella of the brand I have my jewellery division and the apparel side. 

The above picture, is a picture of Xhosa blankets usually worn by Xhosa bride when welcomes into her new family. Having worn the blanket a few years back as seen in the link: https://jewellersbride.blogspot.com/2018/04/when-i-became-xhosa-bride.html?m=1

One of the struggles I found with the blanket was trying to do work while wearing it. So my designs are a contemporary spin of the Xhosa blankets to suit the modern generation and are not mainly designed for brides, but anyone. 

The above picture is one of the sample jackets I had made during the holidays using a blue Xhakato and swade fabric. I had just finished making it when I took the picture. 

Admin

With the Platafrica competition out of the way, now I have to do a lot of admin. I have been doing a lot of reflecting as of late and what I want it all to mean. I think that if I just start off by moving all the little pieces around me, I will see what fits where and it will all make sense. Hence I want to refine what I already have rather than to build up from scratch, as there is unseen beauty in what lays in scattered.

Piece of the puzzle

So today my nephew took out a packet of puzzles and so I decided to join in, I had not put a puzzle together in year and the fact that they were mixed gave it that added challenge. So here were these pieces on the floor and we had to figure out what went where without even knowing how the complete puzzle will look like. 

The pieces on the floor

After some time I started getting frustrated since I didn't know what it was and there were just so many white pieces, that I was tempted to just give up. However I was just so curious and I needed to know what the outcome would be, I had to find out what the pieces would result in. Once i had completed the puzzles, I found the lesson in it all. The lesson or the truth that I was able to get from the situation was that although life may get all mixed up at times and the pieces might not make sense as they are scattered on the floor, however when you take the time, you begin to find that each piece would form one picture. yes, the puzzles had a few missing pieces, however I could finally see what the picture would like. That's the story of life, putting the pieces together in order to understand that it all was for a reason. The same with design, each step of the design process if for a reason, to figure out what goes where and what doesn't in order to join what does to have a complete design. 

partly completed puzzles

Sometimes you will only find the beauty when you take the time to complete what you started.

Let's explore

With my theme idea starting to mould itself into a concept, I have decided to play around with the output method of my narrative. 

So I started off by looking at some disney princess and prince cartoons. The reasoning behind this is that I want to breakdown the idea that, this is one of the first marriage, love and wedding idea that females come across. Basically the first seed which little girls are planted with. I was fairly selective with these and chose to use silhouettes as if to suggest that the idea is introduced to you, but you add the details to the image as you grow in life.  

As seen in the picture above, I went to the cut out these pictures and then placed them onto domed brass plates. I then went on to pierce these out< as seen in the picture below. 

From here, I will see what more I can do to grow the idea.