Hope and indictment: the work of Sophie Peters

Introduction

Sophie Peters’ work is closely intertwined with the act of storytelling. Stemming from the artist’s perspective as an unflinching witness to the circumstances of those around her, implicit in nearly all of Peters’ work is what could be described, in the words of Sipho Mdanda, as the “everyday consequences of apartheid” (2011, p. 19). Peters’ frequent representation of the quotidian alongside scenes of dramatic and spectacular (but nonetheless realistic) violence serves to explore the “daily struggle for survival and for [the] dignity of ordinary people”, as well as the commonplace nature of violence in peoples’ everyday experience (ibid.). As Peters’ career has developed into the present, apartheid’s legacies continue to operate as underlying presences in the work, and her themes gesture towards a hopeful, more equitable future.

Peters’ indictment of the systemic failures of South African society emerges through her life experience. Born in Johannesburg in 1968, Peters currently resides in Manenberg – a primarily residential township on the Cape Flats in Cape Town, developed by the apartheid government in 1966 to accommodate Coloured families who were displaced by the state’s forced removals (Jacobs, 2013) – where she has largely lived since moving to Cape Town in the mid 1980s.

Peters’ work primarily comprises figurative image making that draws upon the observational in addition to the imaginative and surreal to communicate stories that concern daily life, social concerns and biblical themes. This essay provides a close examination of Peters’ work and subject matter through a selection of paintings and linocut prints produced over the course of three decades, from the 1980s into the early 2000s. Drawing from interviews conducted with Peters in 2022 and the artist’s previous interviews with the District Six Museum for the digital project World Art and Memory Museum in 2020, this text functions in conversation with Peters’ own reflections on her work, practice and the events that inspired them.

However, this exploration of Peters’ work is by no means comprehensive. While the artist has been referenced in surveys of South African art in publications such as Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa (Hobbs and Rankin, 1997) and Volume 3 of Visual Century (Pissarra, 2011), unfortunately, her work has not been sufficiently explored on an individual basis in comparison to other artists of her generation. This essay attempts to situate Peters’ work within historical and social contexts by drawing upon the scholarship of Njabulo Ndebele, Emile Maurice, Sipho Mdanda and Mario Pissara, among other art historical and literary scholars attending to the concerns of the 1980s and 1990s in a shifting South African political and social landscape.

As an alumnus of the Community Arts Project and an arts educator, Peters’ practice could be read in a context firmly located within the lexicon of art produced in the milieu of “resistance art” of the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, Peters partook in a number of different landmark contexts: as a participant in the Zabalaza Festival in London in 1990; as an illustrator for numerous books, such as Mafia and the Aeroplane (1994); and her work was collected by institutions such as Iziko South African National Gallery, Durban Art Gallery and the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Peters was also active as an art educator for school children in the 1980s and 1990s. However, it is my hope to expand this contextualisation of her career through close readings of the work, in conjunction with insight from Peters herself, to produce greater insight and, importantly, to further acknowledge Peters’ contribution to art production in South Africa.

While Peters’ choice of subject matter within the realm of the political is pivotal, it is essential, too, to acknowledge the deeply personal nature of her work. The role of her Christian faith in her creative work, as both a visual artist and a musician, has a significant presence in how Peters describes her artwork as a motivating aspect of her practice. Peters has also alluded to the healing nature of art which has, at times, functioned as a means to process difficult experiences taking place in her personal life and of the greater social circumstances around her.[1]

Loneliness (1996) and Peters’ landscapes

Sophie Peters. Lonliness. (1996)

In a number of ways, Peters’ work speaks directly to Mario Pissara’s criticisms of the reductive term “resistance art” which has come to define and delimit the work of artists operating in some fashion against the apartheid state from the 1980s onwards (2011, p. 3). Peters’ work consistently grapples with the legacies of an unequal South African society and in her commitment to the concerns of working class communities, as will be discussed.

Engaging with scholarship that focuses on creative production during the 1980s and early 1990s has been important in situating Peters’ work within the context of this period. This scholarship sheds light on the complexities of debate concerning political and subversive subject matter in art and literature during South Africa’s fraught years of political turmoil, and the country’s subsequent transition to democracy. Writing in 1986, Njabulo Ndebele discusses the concerns of Black writers in the South African context, noting the spectacular nature of South African life in the throes of apartheid:

…[T]he monstrous war machine developed over the years; the random massive pass raids; mass shootings and killings; mass economic exploitation the ultimate symbol of which is the mining industry; the mass removals of people; the spate of draconian laws passed with the spectacle of parliamentary promulgations; the luxurious life-style of whites […] It could be said, therefore, that the most outstanding feature of South African oppression is its brazen, exhibitionist openness. (2006, p. 32)

Reflecting on the work of T.T. Moyana, Ndebele goes on to describe the reality of South African life under the laws of the apartheid state – its obsession with oppressive order in the infinitesimal – as “the spectacle of social absurdity” (2006, p. 33). Ndebele’s articulation of  “social absurdity” of South African apartheid speaks well to the quality of discordance in Peters’ work, as she tackles both unquestionable violence and people’s  everyday, lived realities.

As Ndebele is careful to elucidate, a single work can employ both the spectacular and the quotidian to demonstrate the violence of the apartheid state. The spectacular, as Ndebele articulates it, is prone to ignoring nuance and subtlety in favour of grand displays of defiance (2006, p. 38). The ordinary, however, is attuned to interiority and detail, granting each life the particularities of its subjectivity; each individual’s own hopes, fears, comforts, dreams. The tension in Peters’ work lies precisely in the intermediary between ordinary life and the spectacular, overwhelming presence of the apartheid state, its infrastructure and its legacies. By doing so, Peters develops work that posits both overt and indirect political and social commentary.

Peters speaks to the “ordinary” daily experience through her work Loneliness (1994), a linocut portrait of an elderly woman known to Peters who lived in Wynberg, Cape Town. In her reflection on meeting Auntie Mary and making the work, Peters shared:

It was a tough time for her because she was living in Wynberg with a dog, her husband died and there was no family around. She got a pension, and that covered herself and the dog always. She had no TV. The bread that you see on the table – that was her breakfast. I've kept her in my mind, because she would always be around, and I would go and greet her. At that time, I did some drawings. Me and Penny van Sitter were doing illustrations for some books. I captured her and did that drawing, and then I did a linocut of her. I liked her coziness and quietness. She was always smiling, always happy, full of joy. She gave me that peaceful mind, and she didn't even talk about her family or anything like that. When I left Wynberg, I didn't have any time to visit her again. (2022)

In Peters’ snapshot of Auntie Mary’s home life, Auntie Mary is seen seated on a chair, dressed to leave the house, her handbag held purposefully in place by curling fingers. Laid out next to her on a table is a sliced loaf of bread and what looks like a wine glass and a bowl. At Auntie Mary’s legs is a collared long-haired dog who appears to be eyeing the uneaten bread on the table. The pictured room has a window with drawn curtains underneath a ceiling with wooden rafters. An artwork hangs on the wall. The view through the window reveals an ocean view with Table Mountain in the distance, perfectly framed by the curtains and the window’s frame.

In attending to the ordinary, the quotidian, Peters gives attention to the details of people’s lives who occupy space around her. Regardless of the relation, the attention – and care – in their depictions is further reiterated by the work required to make the image itself; the careful, attentive carving and cutting into of the linocut matrix. And yet, in the midst of the ordinary, in Auntie Mary, Peters inserts the fantastical. Noting that Auntie Mary’s home is situated in Wynberg, the view Peters renders would be entirely impossible. Wynberg sits in the shadow of Table Mountain – an approximately 20 minutes’ car ride from the nearest beach. Speaking about the work, Peters noted that she placed Table Mountain in the window as a way of signaling to the viewer Auntie Mary’s location in Cape Town (2022). However, by reconstructing Auntie Mary’s view entirely, Peters was able to offer her an ideal location for her retirement – the gift of breaking waves and a sea view. Under the fraught conditions of a transitioning nation, even a common genre such as landscape – a recurring subject within Peters’ work – takes on new meaning.

Sophie Peters. Hamlet. (1991)

In Peters’ other iterations of the genre, these seemingly tranquil, countryside scenes nevertheless generate a sense of unease. In Hamlet (1991), pronounced, rotund rain clouds are set against a brewing, directionally marked sky. In the foreground, the central figure casts a sharp shadow and bears a load of harvest on their shoulders. While the mountainous landscape looms in the background – a range of peaks unchanged by the passage of human life – in the foreground, the landscape is cultivated and demarcated by agriculture and its labours. The stark differentiation between nature and cultivation recurs in Endless Winelands from 2000, in which the composition is nearly divided between the patchworked network of farmlands and the mountain range behind them.

In the linocut My Lane (n.d.), a quiet scene of two people, who appear to be an adult and a child, walk together down a lane between two cultivated plots of land. Peters shares her experience that led to the creation of this work:

[I]n Ceres, there were beautiful mountains that I really liked. I visit Ceres all the time and see how people walk down the roads between the trees of peaches and pears. I saw these two walk down [the road], and I took some photographs on a phone. I created that work from what I saw – the people walking to a shop or fetching some milk and groceries. It was in the afternoon, it was nice for them. And that's why I call it My Lane. (2022)

In her expansive, sombre landscapes, Peters brings to the fore the relationship between people who labour on the land, their personal, recreational time and, paradoxically, their subjective interiority. This conflict in Peters’ landscapes leads one to consider the ways in which landscape appears in other aspects of her work, when combined with portraiture, as seen in Loneliness’s imaginative Table Mountain view, as a setting for “informal settlements” in Unity (2004) or when the conventions of landscape are upended entirely, as in Times from my Past and Future/Childhood Days (1999), in which Peters employs multiple perspectives in a single composition. 

Times from my Past and Future/Childhood Days (1999)

As Michael Godby notes, surveillance and cartography are indelibly linked to the conventions of landscape in South Africa in the western idiom, noting that “three of the major South African Landscape artists in the nineteenth century – Charles Michell, Charles Bell and Abraham de Smidt – were Surveyors-General in the colonial government in the Cape, whose daily job it was to reduce the landscape into official or private ownership” (2010, p. 112). By documenting people’s daily experiences, Peters reroutes these associations to create space for an affective sense of longing and mourning. Charged by default, these rural scenes take place in a perpetual mediation on labour, apartheid’s geographies and, beneath these immediate circumstances, centuries-long histories of generational enslavement, the Land Act and the Group Areas Act.

Sorrows of Life (1989), Crucifixion (1987) and Unity (2004) – allegory and faith

Sophie Peters. Sorrows of Life. (1989)

Ndebele speaks about state violence as both spectacular and interpersonal as it is dramatised in literature. But what of the “brazen” and unrelenting violence experienced by communities of colour from both external and internal influence – the daily assault of the state and the complex, oft-analysed and debated domestic crimes within communities and family structures? What to make of the “disrespectful life”, as articulated by Emile Maurice, which has besieged women, queer people, children and the elderly (2011, p. 110)?

I return to Ndebele’s theorisation of the spectacular in South African social and political  formations and what he terms as its “obscene social exhibitionism” (2006, p. 32). The confluence of the shocking, and indeed, the perverse nature of everyday violence – particularly from the perspective of present-day South Africa – complicates Ndebele’s conceptions of the spectacular and the ordinary even further, seeing that the widespread nature of gendered and sexualised violence and discrimination cannot be relegated to the realm of the private, domestic arena alone, but constitutes a national crisis.

Peters’ stark depiction of intimate partner violence in Sorrows of Life (1989) depicts a slain woman and child lying in pools of blood on an orange clay ground outside a single story house. In a long white dress, the woman lies on her back, defenceless, while the infant lies face down only dressed in a white diaper. The house itself is showing serious signs of disrepair; painted yellow, the house’s bare brick is exposed in large sections, the roofing appears cobbled together using different grades of corrugated iron and nearly all of the windows have been shattered. Bricks and rocks lie strewn across ground in front of the house.

In an interview with Peters for the World Art Memory Museum (WAMM), the artist shed further light on the painting through telling a story about the painting’s protagonists, seen and unseen:

A wonderful family was torn apart. He had a wife and two children but threw his life away because of his obsession with drinking alcohol. For days he would stay away, leaving his family without food.

One day he arrived at home and wanted food, but there was none. The youngest was already crying because of hunger but he did not seem to care. He scolded his wife but she protested that there was no food. (Sorrows of Life, 2020)

Peters then goes on to describe, in graphic detail, how the father of this unnamed family murdered his wife and infant and how he abused and permanently maimed his son while in an inebriated state. In the story, Peters’ antagonist, the father, is jailed for his crimes and, following his time in prison, commits his life to God, refrains from drinking alcohol and travels “from city to city” in order to share his story with others (Sorrows of Life, 2020). Towards the end of the story, the father finds some redemption as he and his surviving son find each other and reconcile.

When speaking to Peters about her work, particularly concerning subject matter that engages with topical or enduring social ills, evident in her storytelling is a sermonic, fable-like quality. In the case of Sorrows of Life (and certainly regarding a number of Peters’ other works), once the narrative for the painting is elucidated the artwork and story begin to work together cohesively. In this way, I argue that Sorrows of Life employs the strategies of symbolism  in a manner akin to the western genre of allegorical painting, in which the “characters” of the story, owing to their lack of identifiable specificity, further stand in for recurring narratives of domestic violence and addiction in any number of contexts affected by economic insecurity. The presence of Christian tenets and tropes could also be read within the work – although not uncontroversially – through the symbolism of the deceased mother depicted as an angel (a recurring motif in Peters’ work[2]) or Christ-like figure, and the atonement of the father figure through his devotion to God.

Sophie Peters. Crucifixition (1987)

Faith as a guiding force within Peters’ practice is perhaps most clearly articulated in works such as Crucifixion (1987). An imagined night-time scene set in a city environment between two churches, Crucifixion is an allegory for what Peters describes as experiences of dishonesty, disappointment and betrayal through the biblical story of Peter and Jesus. Parallel to this narrative, and specific to the time in which it was created, is apartheid state violence and violence within policed communities that were amplified and exacerbated by the States of Emergency instated in 1985 and 1986. One could surmise that Peters, in reflecting on both her personal experience and that of the greater social context, repeatedly turned to biblical themes as a means of making sense of what was happening around her.

Sophie Peters. Unity. (2004)

In discussing her work Unity (2004), Peters shared an important insight into how her faith operates within her artistic practice:

God is unique, and he created the world to glorify his image. He is the potter who formed the clay to reveal each unique pattern that came from the potter’s hands. He also gave each person a unique gift or talent to use for the glory of God, working for the good of each one who believes in him. Without God, I would never have had the courage and faith to make art. Creativity always flows through God’s power to me.” (Unity, 2020)

This hopefulness, best exemplified by Unity, speaks directly towards a more optimistic vision of the future – a future in which women unite to create a peaceful, more equal society unencumbered by the burdens of race and class. Following the overt and, at times, graphic descriptions of violence perpetrated against women in Sorrows of Life, many years later, in the linocut Unity, Peters speaks to women’s perspectives as they concern questions of enduring systemic inequality both during and post the apartheid era. In this work, Peters utilises an imaginative compositional approach to develop composite scenes, bringing together multiple concurrent stories, geographies and figures, a technique employed frequently by other printmakers such as Lionel Davis and perhaps most prominently by John Ndevasia Muafangejo.[3]

At the top of the composition, a faceless majestic angel with spread wings sits atop a mountain peak, looking over a conglomeration of scenes that depict women in different contexts: a rural, agricultural landscape with windmills; a rondavel with a donkey; shacks made from corrugated iron; women walking on a desert-like road; in the centre, a woman working over a bucket; and at the very bottom are four women, illustrated from the shoulders up, each with distinct hairstyles and adornment. The first of the four women stares directly at the viewer, smiling broadly, while the others look on into the distance.

Speaking further about the work in both 2021 and 2022, Peters is clear in her aspirations for a fairer society:

God created all people as equals – from every race and culture. I have never seen God creating people to scatter them. He wants them to portray his beautiful image with great love. They were all created in one world to beautify all cities, towns and landscapes. (Unity, 2020)

I felt that we, as people, should be one helping each other. [...]  I wanted to show this world we can get close together – rich or not rich. We can still be happy. And we can still work towards richness – everyone. In South Africa, we can build unity in a beautiful way. (2022)

While her work is not always explicitly political in nature, Peters consistently invokes the social and systemic hardships of everyday life and a longing for a future in which people are able to thrive under more equitable circumstances. In the present moment – a time that almost been defined by rampant pessimism, cynicism and discontent – she continues to hold out for hope, a sensibility that is disarming. As articulated by the late Maurice in his essay Sharp end of the stick: Images of conflict and confrontation, “[A]ll art dealing with social and political projects implies the desire for a better society, and an egalitarian, friction-free world devoid of exploitation and violence, institutionalised, or otherwise.” Not long afterwards, he bemoaned the vision for utopia under the corrupt conditions of South Africa and the “erosion of the moral values for which the struggle was waged” (2011, p. 110). Somewhat less bleakly, perhaps this is the mantle that Peters encourages us to take up: to simultaneously hold the reality of one’s circumstances whilst making space to dream and to hope, unabashedly.

Endnotes

[1] The artistic, visual translation of these real-life events are most explicitly seen in works such as Crucifiction (1987), Sorrows of Life (1989), Lost Inside My Tears (2000), and Circumstances (2008).

[2] Angels have featured in a number of other works by Peters, as seen in the linocuts Lost Inside my Tears (1999) and Unity (2004).

[3] As seen in works by Davis such as Blues for an Islander (1994) and Vanaand Gat Die Poppe Dans (1994) and by Muafangejo Men Are Working in Town (1982).

Bibliography

Godby, M. (2010) The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape. Cape Town: Iziko.

Hobbs, P. and E. Rankin (1997) Printmaking in a transforming South Africa. Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip.

Jacobs, J. A. (2013) Manenberg, South African History Online. Available at: https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/manenberg (Accessed: 2 May 2022).

Maurice, E. (2011) ‘Sharp end of the stick: Images of conflict and confrontation’, in M. Pissarra (ed.) Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Volume Three 1973-1992. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 83–103.

Mdanda, S. (2011) ‘Separate and Unequal: Everyday apartheid as a theme in South African art’, in Pissarra, M. (ed.) Visual Century: South African Art in Context, volume three 1973-1992. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 17–37.

Ndebele, N. (2006) ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa’, in Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Durban: UKZN Press, pp. 31–53.

Peters, S. (2022) telephonic interview with the artist.

Pissarra, M. (2011) ‘Introduction: Recovering Critical Moments’, in M. Pissarra (ed.) Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Volume Three 1973-1992. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 3–15.

Sorrows of Life (2020) World Art Memory Museum. Available at: https://wammuseum.org/artwork/sorrows-of-life/ (Accessed: 30 April 2022).

Unity (2020) World Art Memory Museum. Available at: https://wammuseum.org/artwork/unity/ (Accessed: 1 May 2022).