Umakoti/ bride

 I have found that there are rules to be followed and even a specific hierarchy even among the brides within the family, which is determined by many factors one of these being how long one has been married; thus giving umakoti that has been married longer superiority over a recently married umakoti., this is regardless of the wife’s age.

As part of being umakoti, you are in some ways treated as a new born, in the sense that when you become a new member of the family and are welcomed into the family, you are given a new name and brand new clothes. As you are no longer a girl but a wife, you are then given instructions by the family on how to conduct yourself within the family and depending how strict the family is, you are given instructions on how to conduct yourself outside the family, this is called ukuyala. 

Once this process has been conducted, according to tradition, you are to no longer to be referred to as your birth name, but you may however be called your clan name, and the new wife is to no longer refer to her husband by name especially in front of others, she is to call him bhuti or Tata ka so-and-so (so and so father, the name of the their first born child).  He on the other hand may call you by name; however the name his family has given you. There is so much more involved in the making of umakoti, however for purposes of this report, when I refer to umakoti unless stated, I am referring to someone who has been married for 15 years or less, as a wife who is married longer is regarded as umfazi. 

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.  

Quick thoughts

After the previous posts based on my artworks I began to do a similar write up based on my B. Tech narrative works. As I began to reflect on the symbols, metaphors and the words I had used; I realised that with some of the pieces and poems, I completely pushed the boundaries, or at least mine.

The above picture is an example of what I mean by pushing the boundaries. The picture was one of the artworks, if I can call it that, that I had made a few years ago. When I had initially chose it  from the stuff in the box, I felt that it would be a perfect reference point for my suicide pieces. However, after doing the suicide version of it, I started to find even the pieces to be more than going beyond the box.

I suddenly feel that my topic in itself is pushing in terms of a bridal narrative, and to add suicide in the mix, it sounds a bit morbid. I wanted realistic, to show the millions of narratives swept under the carpet, i finally realise why they are swept under the carpet. Nobody wants to associate marriage, bridal, umakoti etc with sadness and anything negative; hence the fairytales. 

Black tulip

I was busy looking at tulips in order to refine my platafrica design and I came across the purple tulip in the picture below and I just was drawn in like a fish caught on a hook. I just liked the shade of purple as it reminded me of the sunrise from the previous post. I won't be using this shade of purple for the platinum design, as I started looking at the various shades in which the tulip can be found and I came across black tulips and I was settled.

 As I dived in to investigate the validity of the black tulip I found that there was an interesting history to it, one of patience, striving for something that the eye has not seen, yet the mind could envision. Which reminded me of 1 Corinthians 2:9

"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

I found this to be so true as we sometimes limit ourselves to what the eye has known and what we have been told rather than believing and striving for what could be, I feel that as designers we should strive to look beyond what has been done, and the restrictions we have or we too will never reach the day where we can create our own black tulips, 11 years is a long time to work tirelessly towards what eyes have not seen.

The narrative behind the story

The main theme behind what I am current doing is a poem by the spoken word artist, Jefferson Bethke, an international Christian poet. The title of his poem is: sex, marriage and fairytales. You can the video at the following youtube linke: https://youtu.be/I4OK9DmLpCY and the lyrics of the poem at: http://genius.com/Jefferson-bethke-sex-marriage-and-fairytales-annotated

From this poem, I have been developing the whole disney and media idea of romance and have used his poem  as my actual reference and inspiration for both the clay and pierced out domed pieces. I have also designed a few more things from this, like a ring which represent a rollercoaster.

These are CAD/CAM pictures of what am idea I am still developing. The picture below are some of the pictures I am still working on for my interpretation of a rollercoaster ring. 

The whole rollercoaster reveals the instability which he speaks of in his poem, while also the instability of life and marriage itself. 

I still need to fine tune the idea, but now I am just interpreting the idea and the possibilities of expressing the narrative. 

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.