08 Nov 2009
Theoretically Fiona Pole should have at least a million followers: all those people who have left the country since 1994 and who openly or secretly miss South Africa.
Benoni-born Pole knows all about the traumatic sequence of packing, farewells, leaving and building a new life in a strange land. Hers, however, isn’t a story of fear and loathing. It was love that brought her to Paris in 1999. She met her future husband ten days into a holiday on her way back from England, and decided to stay.
To say that she made a career out of ‘leaving South Africa’ would be unfair, but she has certainly used her experiences and emotions for her string of exhibitions, of which the recent Heartland I Handlines at Art on Paper was a subdued highlight. Initially the works look basic, almost simplistic. Like the black silhouette of a woman and a red dress next to it, called Leaving: winter coat. Or the black outlines of two naked feet on a map of Joburg, called Packing up: barefoot.
But this simplicity is deceiving. Pole’s prints are meticulously executed pieces of almost conceptual art. They play with basic universal sentiments, such as loss, sentimentality and memories. But they also go much deeper. They convey warped messages about transience, the inevitable and the apparent randomness of our movements and the lay-out of our tiny, insignificant personal maps, which slowly fade and will eventually be superseded by other people’s maps. Moreover, when seen as a whole the exhibition tells an intricate story of a multi-layered journey.
The idea of using maps on wafer thin Japanese paper for the series Packing up occurred when Pole was drawing old crumbling buildings in downtown Joburg many years ago and read about the new owner who found old maps in the safety deposit boxes of his collapsing mansion. “They all disintegrated upon being handled. So there were these maps that had once served as something and now had turned to dust, while the old buildings were crumbling at the same time. I like that idea.”
What’s equally striking is her use of faceless black silhouettes, which don’t show any emotion, apart from the poses that can easily be read as helpless or resigned, but in fact leave you guessing and force you to answer questions about your own emotions and experiences. And then there’s the white, which works as silence in a music piece, creating new visual hierarchies and a feeling of space and endless possibilities, things closely related to leaving and settling.
Pole is reluctant to talk about her own feelings during the conceptualisation and execution of these prints. When I wonder if she made them with a tear in her eye, she answers with a brisk “No”. And when I ask her if she doesn’t feel nostalgic, she says: “I suppose [I felt] sadness, but it’s quite twee to say that word nostalgia. Poignant is a better word. It’s a sense of loss, leaving things behind. When you live between two countries that’s how your life is. But there’s certainly a lot of emotion involved in making the works and getting into the subject, because it’s tender and raw. It’s work that touches on raw nerves.”
When I say I want to hear a bit more, she sighs: “That’s because you’re a journalist. You want exact answers: it’s this, and because of this I feel this way and I do it.”
My turn to sigh. We flip through the catalogue. This is very sad, I say, pointing at a print called Packing up: heavy bags, which shows the back of a transparent woman, carrying two suitcases. “Very sad,” she answers dryly.
But you don’t want expound? “It’s not that I don’t want to, but putting things in little boxes is dangerous. I’m not trying to depict a certain thing, there’s all these things happening out there and this is my response to it.”
But surely the viewer is stuck with all these questions: what went through her when she made this? Is she sad to have left? Certainly. Does she regret? Perhaps. She nods and says: “Yes, you can ask me. But if you’re looking at the exhibition to find answers about how I felt when I did my work, that’s not interesting.”
She pauses to think. “Look, I’m not being deliberately mysterious. But the work spills over into all kinds of areas, and it’s dealing with emotions that are messy and not clear cut. I can’t say: this is how I felt when I made this work. Of course I felt sadness to leave South Africa and go to a land where I am a foreigner, where I don’t fit in, and where my passport is the wrong passport. And it’s a struggle to stay there. People don’t know me and I don’t express myself as easily in French as I do in English. And there’s regret… No, not regret, I don’t know if that’s the right word. But there is sadness about the time that has passed and that you can never make up because you’re somewhere else.”
Here I must say that I’ve portrayed her much more snappy and moody than she actually is. She comes across as a warm person who jokes and laughs a lot, and has a pleasant mellifluous voice with an accent that betrays both her Benoni roots and her two year stay in England. But like many artists she’s weary of giving away the mystery of her work by being too prescriptive. This is, after all, not a session on a shrink’s sofa.
So we talk about all the misconceptions that surround settling in a foreign land. How we at the southern tip of the world have this romantic idea about life in Paris, full of magnificent art, flaky croissants, well-dressed women and flamboyant men. Reality is much more prosaic. Pole, her husband and their 3-year old son live in a tiny apartment near Gare du Nord, one of the less salubrious parts of the city. She did have a gallery in Paris, but it closed down because of the recession. And like everybody else in France she had to fight tough battles with the notoriously unhelpful civil service.
“South Africans tend to think that there are only traffic jams in Joburg, that no other city in the world suffers from traffic congestion. They think they’re the only people that stand in queues for passports. Well I would say: come over to Paris and try and get through. It’s not a picnic.”
She laughs. “Ja, a girl from Benoni, educated in a Boksberg convent, what is she doing there hey?” Then, on a more serious note that refers to her work again: “I think you tap into loneliness, a well of loneliness that you never knew existed. When I came I didn’t speak a word of French. You can’t communicate. It’s a very strange sensation to be cut off without your language.”
I point at her series of prints called Holidays, in which we see a child jump into a swimming pool. What does she miss most about South Africa? “Family,” she says. “But I also miss the light, and the energy of Joburg. I love to drive to the city on the M2 highway, looking out over downtown. And drink up this light. It’s something I can’t get enough of: that blinding light. And I miss the space, this huge open space. I miss these thunderstorms, and the way the rain stops and the sun will come out. In Paris it can rain day after day and it seeps into your bones, into everything.”
CV
1974Born in Benoni
1993 Bachelor of Fine Art (honours), Rhodes University
1999 Moves to Paris
2000 Diploma in printing, l’Ecole Supérieur Estienne, Paris
2008 Exhibition The long goodbye, Atelier Leblanc, Paris, Olivier Sultan Collection at Drouot, Paris, African Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium, Art on Paper (2007).
2009 Exhibition Heartland I Handlines, Art on Paper
Heroes/influences:
Alexander Calder, The Circus (1926 – 1931); “The Pompidou Centre held a Calder exhibition this year, so I queued for hours with my 3-year old son to see it, having previously only seen it in books and films – we were both blown away.”
George Coutouvidis: “My first year Fine Art lecturer 1993, Rhodes University.”
Bridget Baker: So it goes, tins, photographs, Vicks VapoRub, 4 tins each 3.5 cm x 2 cm. “This work stays in my mind. I have only ever seen a photograph of it in the book Art in South Africa, the future present by Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal. The work consists of four tins of Vicks, each with the same photo of Baker and her father in a swimming pool. In each tin, the photos are covered with a layer of VapoRub which gradually gets thicker and thicker.
Rembrandt: Hendrickje bathing in a River, 1654, oil on panel, 61.8 x 47 cm, National Gallery, London. “This small, intimate painting of a woman bathing in a stream is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.”