Shana de Villiers

I am a South African artist and seamstress of scraps. My work shifts between the performative, visual and literary, engaging with queer post-coloniality and the monstrous. Through the borrowing and transformation of found objects, images, texts, and textiles, I cobble craft, critical theory, and internet-age mythologies into wearable works, sculptures, texts, performances, and theatrical installations. I work with various forms of patchwork-assemblage because its coming together assumes a material history and a present transformation. With a collage-like working method, I draw on my “monster archive”; an ongoing collection of clippings, images and internet memes. Inspired by myth, monstrosity, shame and storytelling, my collection hosts creatures such as Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, a Teletubby with an aged face, a female bodybuilder, and mutated sea creatures. These images form the basis for patchworks, sculptures, wearable objects and performances, in which I unravel and question normative structures. Like a seamstress, I transform found textiles, images and text fragments, in which the arbitrary criteria of what is classified as normal or monstrous are examined. As we know, history is fiction, and so are archives. Therefore, I have complicated feelings about archive neutrality, but the archive is also a scrumptious body of material because, through access to it, one can make mashups. One can re-member, so as not to forget! That's why I love collecting shiny things like a magpie. I also love collecting/recording/mashing up memetic instances from the internet because I believe we are in the precursor of a cultural dark age, and want to re-member so as not to forget. Mushy-looking, colourful characters and fragmented stories that mirror societal fears and postcolonial complications are the hallmarks of my work - no matter my choice of medium or material, of which there’s always plenty.