Click the thumbnail image to view a larger version

Bronwen Findlay and Daina Mabunda, Bed-Spread 1998

BRINGING UP BABY
artists survey the reproductive body
Curator: Terry Kurgan

Exhibition held at the Castle, Cape Town
Albany Museum, Grahamstown Festival of Arts
Wits Art Galleries.

From the catalogue:

Over the past few years, Daina Mabunda and Bronwen Findlay have worked together on large cloths. Their process usually starts with Findlay painting, with flour and water as a resist, onto the cloth. Mabunda then embroiders and uses beadwork to complete motifs and designs in conjunction with these painted elements. The bedspread produced for this exhibition, and exhibited on a double bed in the gallery space, is similarly, a fusion of ideas from Mabunda and Findlay. These ideas are derived both from elements used in their past works, and as a result of discussions and new thoughts developed in response to the Bringing Up Baby, project.

Within the simultaneously decorative and domestic plate motif, both artists have responded to the issues of the project via their designs: flowers and hands of friends and family members from Findlay, with Mabunda adding toys, guns and continuing the use of hands. Beds and the places we sleep, are in most contexts metaphorically associated with sex, conception, birth, illness and death. The bed is also usually an intimate, private space, a space of dreams. The iconography of the bedspread, which is tied to the personal and cultural memories of these two artists, might be seen as the mapping of these dreams.