Mandy Johnston burns art to rekindle lost traditions

If you have been to the supermarket lately and found shelves mysteriously missing steel wool, I can explain. It was Mandy Johnston. She bought every roll of steel wool.

To burn it. Let me rewind. Johnston is a South African artist.

She has an exhibition, titledGatherer, on at the Berman Contemporary All Women Art Gallery, V&A Waterfront, in Cape Town. “Steel wool, for me, is like a commentary on the fact that we construct these man-made things that seem so strong and so formalised. Steel is one of the hardest substances on Earth but in another form it’s so fragile and can burn,” said Johnston, a few days before the exhibition’s opening on Thursday, 28 May.

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At the opening, selected human-form wireframe sculptures, including dog sculptures, were set alight, their steel wool surfaces erupted into orange sparks before collapsing to the floor. It was beautiful to watch the one-off component of the exhibition. I am not sure if Johnston will be recasting the sculptures in steel wool to reburn them for another audience.

When I asked, it was a firm “no”. Videos of the burn do exist. Art buyers then buy the burnt remaining frames/sculptures.

Aside, I knew Johnston’s work and it hit me that her first work I encountered was at this year’s Cape Town Art Fair, where I called her beautiful burnt wood sculpture an anorexic Jackson Hlongwane sculpture. I have been a fan ever since. Those who have been to AfrikaBurn might have seen her Burning Man Sculpture too.

These are works of art to admire, really. Along the walls of the new exhibition are some visually appealing black landscape paintings. I later learnt that they were not paintings in the traditional sense of the word but rather ash from the sculpture burns.

The remnants have been reincorporated into paintings and titledEarth Meets Ash. The surfaces are smoky and mineral-rich, suspended somewhere between landscape and memory. They resemble scarred fields viewed from above or weather systems gathering over exhausted terrain.The exhibition, which has technically been unfolding since 9 May this year, has been open for some time before the official opening.

Johnston spent three weeks inside the gallery building her workin situ; inviting strangers, friends and passing tourists into the making of it. People wandered in while she stitched steel wool onto wire dog sculptures and spread out ash on canvasses. The cleaning ladies outside quipped and called the gallery “la ndawo ineziporho ngaphakathi!” [the place with ghosts inside] owing to the appearance of the wireframe sculptures with steel wool.

I envy whichever collector gets the artworks. There is something deeply Johannesburg about Johnston. Not merely because she was born and raised there, or because she studied Fine Art at Wits under Walter Oltmann, Karel Nel, Penny Siopis and more art luminaries, but because her work carries the psychic architecture of the city of Johannesburg: its unease, improvisation, violence, tenderness and constant becoming.

“Johannesburg teaches people to build while things are breaking,” she said. Johnston speaks in long, searching thoughts, as though she is discovering ideas while articulating them. At one point she recalled a two-week Wits seminar unpacking the word “tradition” with Colin Richards; an experience that has remained etched in her thinking ever since.

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