Draw

Introduction:

My name is Nyakallo Maleke. I am an artist, a writer and a cyclist from Johannesburg. My studio is based in Fordsburg, at the Bag Factory Artist Studios. I work across disciplines but my practice is specifically grounded in drawing, printmaking and installation. My work explores ideas that relate to migration and moving by way of mapping space, it is rooted in vulnerability even though it is embedded in a material language. My drawings are attentive to mark making. Drawing becomes a form of writing and writing becomes a form of drawing and fiction. 

I’ve prepared a reflexive text that is intended to guide me in how I articulate what the practice of drawing is for me. In contrast to this discussion, I want to share my perceptions with the collective with regards to how I am approaching my own work around this medium, how its definition goes beyond a 2 dimensional form of representation. In other words, my practice seeks to make sense of the same story through convention and in a manner that is palpable and wholly material.

Since the emergence of my drawing practice, I’ve realised that drawing becomes a practice for dialogue making, and for grappling tangibly with form, line, texture amongst detail – the principles and elements of design and drawing. Even though I work in an abstract form, my practice is not a rejection of the convention, but acknowledgement because these rules construct my compositions. Making in conversation with these principles allows me to significantly locate and to stay present not just with my sense of self and my imagination, but with hope, in the present and in the future.

I am interested in how the physical language of making a drawing, is a material centred conversation even though its final form relates to or becomes about a broader sense of thinking about mapping and place making in relation to myself. This talk/text is also about considering how the process for creating a drawing unfolds through space and time, through materiality, migration, and the vulnerable. 

I’ve chosen to ground my practice in drawing because I felt that we weren’t seeing enough drawings, but also I was thinking about this medium as a form of archiving one’s practice. Here, I mean that the practice of drawing is about archiving a pattern of how I process information, emotion, migration or place – all of this information (either personal or shared information) that I’d been internalising for some time. 

Having mentioned this, I would say that I understand drawing to be a form of referencing in a visual sense – engaging with mark making in a physical and in a literal way, but again, drawing is about truth telling – when we draw a portrait of someone, or a plan about a place, we are in essence representing a truth or something that likens the truth. Another example that I would like for us to consider, is if we think about the guideline that is used by dress makers, the pattern design which gives the hand an opportunity to retrace, and to imitate without an error. The pattern template trains the eye to not just observe but to outline, or cut out with precision and proportion in mind, in the same way that one would go about drawing from life or from still life. Although different in subjectivity, the intention behind the approach is to translate what is already templated. To practise repeatedly in the event that the hand does not forget. if we go back to the example of the pattern design, let’s say one is making a pair of pants, the hand cuts the draft for the right leg, and it repeats again a similar gesture of mark making on the left hand side.

But to not steer too far away from my practice, and the purpose of this talk – I just wanted to leave you with that thought and to layer it again by threading together the moments that take place in the drawings that I have produced in the last 5 years.

Slide# :3 – 6

Drawing has become a deep and personal way of working. The feelings and processes that I undergo to decode my reality is articulated through this medium. It triggers my ability to respond in the moment and to generate a reaction that is introspective. The final outcome of the work is a translation of that ongoing introspection and in a way this trajectory is continued currently.

Drawing is about the immediate. The now, and how important it is to desire joy, and to make it tangible. To desire peace and to make it tangible. To desire liberation and to make it tangible. Its triggered impulses and emotions, as well as an instinct because drawing is about being able to resonate in the moment. And through a very meticulous form of mark making, I am able to meditate on the feelings that I encounter on a daily basis. Mostly, drawing enables me to be present in moments that make me feel absent and to block out the noise when I start to feel like I am not myself. The works that echo this sentiment is in Shine your light (2020)- which is made up of amorphous figures that pan across the surface of the page, motioning from both ends as they tug at bold and abstract forms. Untitled (2020) – a kind of colour study, abstract and bold constructs a dramatic colour effect. Enclosed (2020)  refers to an enclosing form. and Deep Imagining: A mapping of collective desires (2023) a collection of manifestations, favourite things to do and evidence of experiments that have succeeded. The  drawings were made with cotton or metallic thread, pencil, oil pastel, charcoal and watercolour. When I started my drawings, it was important to go back to basics. Relearning the elements of design and its principles in order to construct an image. In a way this was an instruction – if we think about the Fluxus movement. This methodology grounded my point of departure for how I started to re-engage with this medium. I must also mention that all if not most of my drawings are produced on wax paper. Because of its vulnerability and its influence for how I developed my mark making language. What would begin as a kind of study would evolve into what we see now in front us. The way that I work is not in a stringent way. I’ve always worked in fluidly – by listening to the work and listening to the materials, the creases, the rhythms – in order to understand further what these instructions for drawing mean when we create.

Slide #7 – 8

Sometime in May, I participated in a residency at Transwerke, located at constitutional hill in Joburg. Our constitutional court is located onsite  at the outskirts of the city, and it is surrounded by an environment that is rapidly decaying. Infrastructure, human rights violations, basic service delivery needs etc, and I was invited by a young artist to participate in their project at the venue. The idea was to think about collaboration in relation to memory and I worked with Dudu Bloom More (paper discs), Mbali Mthethwa (beaded works) , Sibabalwe Ndlwana (naturally dyed tapestries) – whose works are seen and included in the space. And part of the process entailed a conversation which allowed me to get a sense of how we were all thinking about ourselves and our practices in relation to the city, if we still are interested in this idea of making work about the city  like our predecessors – which I can unanimously confirm that we weren’t. in different ways, we were creating, always and thinking about a particular place or space, but it never included Johannesburg. Instead, each work that was contributed in the space carried individual sentiments and influences that belonged to a history, a heritage and an intergenerational way of working, which has found its space in the contemporary. I resonated with all of the women’s work because of a shared imagination to want to build alternative spaces even when we’re changing and adjusting with the current. From that process, I realised that each of the contributions came from a gentleness and a deep love for their making, it is the idea of the organic, the flora and fauna of the natural enviroment that informs the process for how we establish our relationships to both, place and self, and nature and self. The results that you see consisted of an installation mural, works on paper and beaded works. 

Slide#: 9 - 14

I began to draw out of a need to develop an archive that documented a movement during 2017 and 2019. Some of these moments lead to questions around home, and rootedness. What does it mean to be uncomfortable, and how does one go about cultivating stability within the discomfort? A range of questions would be conjured and manifested in real time to make sense of the present. How does one go about realising home? How does one firmly place their feet on the ground in unfamiliar territory? What is the best way to mediate and make tangible, the desires that one might experience in the present with what one imagines to sustain for themselves in the future? And so this is how the work Code Switching Duologue emerged. It was a work that drew from multiple experiences that occurred within a geographical location. 

the medium of drawing does not exist only as a visual practice, it is textual. It needs to be read in unconventional approaches. The work needs to be read intuitively and with the body. Rooted in abstraction, my work is made up of shapes, textures and forms that are compiled together to generate a unity. Each work unearths fragments of a reality and fragments of an alternative world that is also fictional because I am interested in creating alternative spaces and worlds that could coexist with the present. When the noise gets too loud in the real world, I can escape and feel liberated elsewhere. Beyond communication and translation, my drawings become a guideline for worldmaking, and for being sentimental. Each mark that is being made is a statement, that is consolidated through line or a texture and materials. If drawings could speak back they really will echo, “Notice Me!”, “Recognise Me”, “Everything starts with me!”. Incidentally, I would come to terms with the possibility that drawing is capable of personifying. 

With code switching duologue, I was invested in the idea of code switching by translating a confusion, an anxiety, an doubt, a push back and a reclaiming and grounding of self through this 15 m installation. The work almost became a diary about my experiences in a different country and negotiating space for myself. In contrast to this, the drawing served as a notation for space, and the rhythms of intensity that resound in space.  I wanted to have a work that also allowed people to participate, or to walk with the work as a way of being a part of it. The work was shown as part of my post graduate project but it was also included in a group show titled Territories between us curated by Tshegofatso Mabaso, at IZIKO, a national museum in cape town.

Slide#: 15 - 19

The project: The Things we made for the things we did not know (2022 - 2023), is a work that I think starts to communicate this idea of the textual and only through participation from an audience, will the works reveal its meaning or lack thereof. The things we make for the things we did not know is a project that considers the idea of uncertainty, in full throttle. What does it mean to make work for something that isn’t too sure of its becoming? It is a project that uses trial and error as a method of approach, because its moulding and adjusting to the circumstances of space. The process of this work was working in situ at the Javett Art centre UP, in the capital Pretoria where the exhibition, Scenorama, curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Gillian Fleischman was held,  The museum became a studio that I would work from for a duration of six months. I would spend the day drawing, organising, laying out and building the installation. I worked with a number of artists for this project who contributed different works, sound, text and a dream catcher, work that belonged to their own practices. I am still navigating through my ideas around collaborations and collective work, and figuring out my position and labour in relation to these formats but I think when I started to work this way I was really interested in thinking about how do we allow artistic practices to continue during a time where we were all isolated? And how can a collective or collaborative approach function as a safety net for artists and their practices? I think the project then draws itself out as what you see. The second iteration took place in Durban, at the KZNSA Gallery in Kwa-ZuluNatal. My collaborators were Matsehlane Xhakaza, Caterina Giansiracusa and Crista Uwase, Billy Langa, and Sandile Radebe.

I have not been too fascinated by the performance of holding a pen or a pencil, a chalk, a charcoal, an oil pastel or a soft pastel but observation remains important. I observe the principles and elements of design as they accumulate into an image. My drawing practice continues to be consumed by the perspective of going back to basics and understanding the nuances of each detailing element.

Drawing is partly intuitive yet, it is fully held by intimate gestures – like the closeness of feeling the textures of my drawing materials, and the smell of burning glue, the wax paper crinkling and observing an embossed outline that is left behind due to a fold.

With this being said, Drawing is an inquiry of looking deeply.

Drawing involves feeling and listening deeply...

Slide#: 20 - 24

I continue to be obsessed with lines. 

Lines create and organise multiple perspectives to converge on a two dimensional surface. They will always be the first gesture that I make on paper when I am working on a new drawing. I have learned through lines the various ways of crafting them, and how they navigate place in arbitrary ways. They pin point somewhere from the inside and then they point out like an extension. Even though they may appear flattened, lines can also be sculpted.

I am Drawn to behaviour. I am drawn to sound.  Even though I don’t know how to make music. My drawings often come out as notations for a sound.

Slide #: 28 -32

My drawings are compositions and manuscripts for space. 

I am reckoning with the idea that drawing contains with it, a social and personal responsibility. Drawing is an act of service, and a space for hopefulness and faith. It is a moment between freedom and belonging and it is a moment between doing and undoing - being in conversation with convention and tradition, and being against a comfortable norm.

My drawings hold space in the face of fear, the illogical and the confusion of the world, which causes us to be deliberate as we own the marks that we make on the drawing surface. Drawing has always been conversational, an outspoken friend. So in this ongoing drawing series Manuscripts, I have been drafting a body of work that is involves a process of collaging with materials that I have worked with or continue to work with. In a way it’s like a retrospective on materials. And each drawing is constructed and produced as an assemblage of techniques of making. I write what I like sometimes, and there was a point where my drawings where extensions of the things that I wrote and vice versa. Even though I have not written at length in a long time, manuscript kind of continues that idea of writing visually.

Slide #39 – 40:

This place is in my head all day is an installation that I produced for the Aichi Triennale last year. I was interested in using drawing as a space for manifesting a place and so I produced a number of drawings and sculptures for the show. The influence for this installation from (1995) came from Moshekwa Langa’s work whose practice influences my own greatly. I had also created a similar iteration of this work in 2017, as part of the outdoor mural project at a Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg.

 Alongside the works of Kay Hassan, Dineo Bopape, Donna Kukama, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Thomas Hirschorn amongst the list of artists whose practices also influence my own. I had also created a similar iteration of this work in 2017, as part of the outdoor mural project at a Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg.

We aren’t drawing enough, Or a lot.

We should be drawing more.

Draw was first read as part of my guest presentation for the University of Lincoln ( 17 October 2023)