Sven Christian [SC]: Let’s talk about your MA, Re-Forming the Monstrous?

Gabriele Jacobs [GJ]: In simple terms, I was reimagining these mythical tales, but without centring the human characters; looking at the monsters as victims in these stories, to be dominated and killed. The only work from this show that I brought to exhibit at the Centre was Cerberus (2022), who wasn’t killed, but kidnapped. On the one hand there’s this environmental allegory about how the natural world is perceived. It’s viewed as something to be conquered, taken advantage of, destroyed… For me, there was also a queer reading of these monsters as being othered. Rather than having them persecuted, I was thinking about how they protect themselves. But it was also just an excuse to make fun, many-headed creatures, which is a bit of a go to for me.

SC: Not all of the creatures that you make are mythological, though. For example, the Jacana work, Daddy long-legs (2018)?

GJ: That was from an earlier project. It doesn’t refer to a specific, pre-existing myth. At the time I was thinking about making my own mythical characters. I liked the idea that male Jacana’s look after their chicks. I was imagining this nurturing deity, not necessarily for children but everything that we create. The extra legs are there because the male Jacana carries its babies, so you often see their little legs popping out. Something about this image reminded me of monsters. That was the departure point to give it extra heads and so on. A few years after that I made the two-headed crane, which is a small monument to self-acceptance and self-love. I made it when I was very depressed, and it helped. I spent many ours smoothing it.

SC: So you found its making therapeutic?

GJ: I do a lot of sanding, smoothing things out by hand, which is very therapeutic. Sometimes I pull away because I can get obsessed with those processes, particularly with clay. But there’s also something very satisfying about sanding soft wood, because you can immediately tell the difference. Working with power tools, on the other hand, is quick. One day I would like to learn to make more traditional hand-carvings, but with a dremel and baby angle grinder.

SC: The one tool in the workshop that excites me is the finger sander.

GJ: That’s definitely my favourite. When I made those little heads of the Jacana that’s what I used. Dremel’s are nice for details, but those little belts always pop off, so I prefer the finger sander. I also used one when making the roots for Cerberus.

SC: Are the roots a part of Cerberus’s mythology?

GJ: They take a slightly different angle. Cerberus is the guardian of the underworld, and I was thinking of roots as these things that are mostly invisible and underground. I also did a lot of reading. There’s an amazing book by Anna Tsing called The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), which talks about mycelium and how trees have evolved in relation to these things in the soil. It was a way of giving a little home to the aardwolf. I was lucky to find a bunch of timber from an old house that belonged to my supervisor. It was being renovated, and I took the wood and turned it into these organic, rooty shapes.

SC: The roots remind me of those scenes in Disney movies, where you see someone wondering happily through a sunny, open glade. Then they enter the wood and it gets dark and there are all these roots and eyes that start popping out! I guess Disney also adopts a lot from the general corpus of mythology; these Greco-Roman myths also take root in a lot of contemporary stories. But Cerberus is a three-headed hyena, right?

GJ: There are different versions. The most widely recognised is a three-headed dog. But he may have had a hundred heads, and the tail was a snake… In 2020, when thinking about this, I spent some time in Rosendal, a tiny town in the Free State. There are so few people around, and we spent a lot of time walking in this beautiful forest. The next year it flooded, and the forest became a swamp, but we saw this Aardwolf that had been killed by a passing car. It’s sad because that’s generally how people encounter them. They’re very shy, dog-like, nocturnal creatures that live underground, and so it felt like a good fit, especially because I wanted to situate these creatures within a South African context. For the birds I was looking at South African waterbirds, and for Chimera (2022) I used a Caracal…

SC: Animals occupy an important place in all of the world’s mythologies. When we were both young I know that we read a lot of Redwall (1986 – 2011),1 but the personification of animals seems ever-present. What’s the connection for you? What drew you to Redwall as a kid?

GJ: I started reading those books when I was very young, and just loved the cosy woodland aesthetic, but there was also a lot of action and food-related scenes.

SC: Yes, the creatures in the abbey host all these ceremonies. The abbey is also considered this safe space that they can retreat to, but it’s also often under siege, so there’s this sense of an impending threat. The Secret of NIMH (1982),2 another film I loved, had a similar premise. Again, it’s about these field mice who live underground, who need to flee because they live on farmland and it’s plough season — the son is ill, and can’t move, so the mom seeks help from a nearby colony of rats. As with Daddy long-legs, there’s that instinct or drive to protect one’s young, but in the film it’s maternal. How significant is it for you that there’s a paternal quality to that work?

GJ: That’s what first drew me to it, as well as the Hedgehog. They’re from the same body of work. I was looking at queer practices within animals — reproduction and so on. The Jacana is quite different to most bird species because the father rears the young. It’s called polyandry, where the female will mate with multiple males and it’s up to them to look after their chicks and incubate the eggs. It’s quite simple, but I was thinking about how, in patriarchal societies, rearing one’s young is not something we associate with men. There aren’t a lot of good father figures, and I was like, ‘Look at this bird! We could learn from them.’ There’s also just the image of this bird with all these little baby legs sticking out — it was too good to resist.

SC: In your thesis you also reference Mary SIbande’s dogs of war…

GJ: Yes. I’m not sure if she directly references Cerberus, but she also created this three-headed dog.

SC: Yours are a lot more timid, though. You could stroke them, whereas Mary’s are quite fierce. They’re on the hunt. One of my favourite works of Mary’s, interestingly, was this womb-like installation that she created at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda in 2016, as part of The Purple Shall Govern. It was up at the Monument, in this circular gallery beneath a stage. She suspended a bunch of these umbilical forms, which were lit up. You could lie on the ground and look up at them, and there were these, presumably unintented, muffled sounds of people moving around outside — it almost felt like being back in the womb.

GJ: Those forms also have a bit of a root-like quality to them, but are soft.

SC: It’s tangential, but you were showing me your grandfather’s wood-carvings, and I wondered about his influence and the carvings he made?

GJ: He made these classical Baroque-like, very ornate woodcarvings. He also loved animals. He taught me how to draw as a child. A lot of the work that I do has this connection to him, which is really nice.

SC: Did you spend a lot of time with him while he was carving?

GJ: Yes. He used to have this little workshop underneath the house. I would go down there and he would show me how to do it, and I would sit and draw. We had all these little books, where he would teach us — he’d draw this cute little animal and I’d try copy it. Looking back, there are all these beautiful sketches that he made, accompanied by the most chaotic scribbles — I was very much a child. It was fun.

SC: Is drawing for you a way of visualising what you want to make, in sculptural form, or does it have a different life?

GJ: I’ve done a lot of drawing here, because I felt like I needed to do something to prove to myself that I’m meant to be here. But you saw the Cormorant drawings that I made, while working, to figure out angles and things. So I do a lot of drawings but most are quite quick, structural things. It’s the medium that I’ve been working with the longest and is the thing that I’m most comfortable with, so I tend to return to it.

SC: Your process is both additive and subtractive. Could you talk about this?

GJ: With the figurative clay works, you first build them up and then refine them. With wood, it can be quite daunting, trying to imagine what you can pull out of this big block. When I made Daddy long-legs, for example, I would cut out these crude heads or shapes, clamp them together, and then carve from there. I’d like to do that again now with the Hamekop.

SC: That was the first bird you started drawing in residence, right?

GJ: Yes. I’ve only seen it twice — once here and across the road at Farmhouse58 — but it left an impression. Their nests are amazing, but there’s a lot of mythology around them too. It reminds me of Nicholas Hlobo’s sculpture, iimpundulu zonke ziyandilandela (2011), which I saw in the atrium of Zeitz MOCAA. Now it’s in a different gallery upstairs, which is great because you can get up close, but it really filled the atrium.

SC: Your engagement with space is also quite considered. For your MA, Cerberus was shown on the floor. Here it’s on a plinth…

GJ: That’s one of the most exciting parts for me. I framed that work as an installation, but it’s not immersive. I like how one can interact with and disrupt space. It’s like the Moorhen’s that I’m working on now, which will also sit on the gallery floor, transforming it into a little pond. I like the idea of things that are hidden, and playing with what is revealed — how the roots look like they’re coming out of different surfaces… On one hand, I’m thinking about how so much of what goes on is unseen, or on a scale that we can’t interact with. Then there are these power structures and things that we’ve become accustomed to, to the point that they’re almost invisible. When making that body of work I was imagining it in a particular space, the white cube, which has its own particular history. It’s this very cold, alienating space. For me the roots help to disrupt that.

SC: It’s also where you begin to introduce that sense of childish wander in your audience. There’s an imaginative aspect to it, as with fantasy novels, where there are worlds within worlds. It’s the place of imagination that excites me; how you instil that in your audiences.

GJ: Yes, it’s up to the audience to imagine what else is going on; where these things lead. It’s a little on the nose, but when I started making such work I was creating these long, soft Polecats. I wanted to make an installation where they were coming out of the walls. That was fun. I discovered that although they’re normally solitary, they’re often found to have these homosexual alliances, where you’d find two male or two female Polecats that would bond.

Another thing with space, which I wrote about, was anarchitecture from the ‘70s in New York. It’s far from what I do, but there’s a great lecture on YouTube by Jack Halberstam, who’s a theorist I really enjoy. He talks about anarchitecture and ways of disrupting hegemonic systems.3 He wrote a book, The Queer Art of Failure (2011), which was a big influence on how I work, especially with ceramics. I make a lot of moulds. Rather than using them to replicate identical things there’s a case for letting them fail; making different little creatures from what should be this uniform mould.

SC: What’s the premise?

GJ: He’s thinking about how what’s deemed as successful under capitalism is pretty terrible for most beings on earth. He positions failure as a good thing.

SC: ‘Breaking the mould,’ so to speak?

GJ: Exactly. So much of what is deemed successful, these things that we strive for, can be very self-destructive. It reminds me of this wonderful quote by Guillermo Del Toro, talking about monsters: ‘Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.’4 That really brought me back to The Queer Art of Failure, because so much of my work is about these monsters. It felt like another reminder of why I’m looking at them.

SC: Thinking about spatial dynamics, how does it shift when thinking about producing work for outdoors, in a place like NIROX?

GJ: I try to recreate what’s happening around us, so it hasn’t shifted much, in the sense that when I start making something I’m already thinking about the space in which it is going to go. It’s interesting because NIROX — like the idea of nature — is also an artificial space. It’s something that Halberstam talks about: how ideologies reinforce certain ideas, particularly in relation to queerness. For example, if you look at what goes on in the animal kingdom there is the most amazing array of sexual practices, and yet there’s this argument that being gay is against nature, so the idea of something being ‘natural’ is used to reinforce hegemonic ideas, from sexuality and gender through to colonialism: the idea of some untouched or uninhabited wilderness can be taken advantage of…

SC: I guess this is where the focus on animals that practice polyandry or which subvert stereotypical gender roles is important. Ditto the reimagining of particular dominant myths… I’m wondering if there’s a reason that most of the birds that you work with are aquatic?

GJ: When I arrived at NIROX those were simply the birds I saw — the Moorhens, Geese, Herons…. It also tied into my MA and the Stymphalian birds, which are these swamp birds that Hercules was sent to kill because they were defending themselves from, and apparently eating, people…

SC: Sounds like Hitchcock!

GJ: Yes. But a lot of the monsters were these swamp like creatures — the Hydra as well — which is really interesting, because water is such an important aspect of life. Somehow it’s given this negative, murky, monstrous association. The focus on aquatic birds also made sense at NIROX because the water is such a big part of the landscape. I’ve also done some reading about the sea: certain queer authors relate the tides and sea to queer experience, which is another way of pushing back against the idea of queerness as being against nature, or this eternal natural process, which is ever-shifting.

This is totally random, but I remember in high school we read this poem by Dylan Thomas called “Poem in October.” It speaks about water birds, and felt relatable:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbor and neighbor wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron —

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth

My birthday began with the water—

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder

I guess it also points to how water birds exist in all these different worlds — they fly, they’re on land, in water… They’re really doing the most.

SC: They’re also exposed to the most… There’s something quite beautiful in your explorations of the Cormorant, and your choice to show it drying its wings — for me that’s a particularly vulnerable state. You have to wait.

GJ: There are certain birds that are better adapted to water, which don’t have to do that, but Cormorants have this typical, very beautiful behaviour. Even for people who aren’t birding enthusiasts, it’s an image that resonates.

SC: Where do you see the place of romanticism in your work? As a sentiment?

GJ: In art history, romanticism occupies a very particular period. I guess I haven’t seen so many romantic sculptures. I think more of painting, but I do think it plays into my work.

SC: I’m thinking about the drawings you showed me of Andrew Wyeth’s, his woodland drawings, which also feels quite romantic, albeit haunted…

GJ: He was an amazing draughtsman, but I think he was quite haunted.

SC: I’ve never been that great at art history — I can’t give you the dictionary definition of romanticism — but in my head, it feels like there’s a return to nature aspect, but that’s it’s more desirous. There’s a sense of longing, more generally. I guess it’s quite forward looking, quite hopeful?

GJ: Sometimes it’s looking to this imagined past.

SC: And there’s an idealisation that happens with that?

GJ: Yes. Very much so. That’s something I wouldn’t argue against in my work, I think. In a more mainstream way, there’s a form of romanticism that has very specific connotations that are tied to capitalism, i.e. Valentine’s Day, but I think my work is fairly sentimental. Although I include the more ugly aspects of it, it’s idealised version of the natural world.

SC: The grotesque?

GJ: Yes, exactly. Even the baby birds. I’m excited to make a mould of the one I was working on so that I can make some squishy versions of them.

SC: It’s clear that you’re also very cognisant of the material choices that you make, for example, your experiments with wild clay that you foraged here. When we spoke the other day you mentioned how it might fire as a more reddish, earthly brown. That was a conversation you’d already had with yourself…

GJ: I think these might not be the best clay, but it seems to be working. The process of filtering the water out, straining it — I feel quite bad because I just usurped the colander from the kitchen — but seeing the different things in the soil, removing them, and hopefully turning that into a useable material… I was even thinking about the mystery of how it will fire. We’re also so used to getting clay in bags. When I visited the first time, I was excited to find materials here to work with. I found a bunch of materials in the workshop when I arrived, which I’ve also used, but there’s something gratifying about harvesting them yourself. A lot of what I do is trial and error. Again, ‘the art of failure’...