Venda Sun 19
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| Sculpture by John Baloyi, Venda, South Africa |
Neighbours of mine have just returned from Barcelona and Nick was showing me the inside of the Sagrada Familia on his phone, the light from the different coloured windows, the columns like trees. I never went inside when I visited the city because the children were little and the queues too long. But there's a lot in Gaudi that reminds me of John Baloyi a South African artist whose work we saw years ago and who, sadly, we never met. He was out when Jackson Hlungwani took us to his studio and then he was killed in a car crash.
It's the light, the sense of space, the twisted shapes, the animals, glittering mosaics. I don't know if Baloyi knew Gaudi's work and I hope that in 2015 his studio is taken care of, preserved properly, given the status it deserves, because in 2012 it looked as if it was on the verge of complete neglect. What a scandal.
Wednesday August 1, 2012
I'm hoping for a full dawn chorus but in
the winter the birds aren't so active, apart from the cockerel. I'm
disappointed. Giya and I manage to
rig up a bag shower I bought from the pound shop in Brighton. It's marginally
better than washing in a bowl.
The sun comes up opposite the terrace the
houses are built on, behind a range of low hills. The mist has gone. It's 10 am
and already hot. A neighbour gave us two pumpkins and some Chinese leaves.
We've worked out how to make toast.
John Balolyi's crocodile in the Polokwane
art gallery was one of the first sculptures I saw by local artists, before
Jackson took us on a tour of Limpopo studios all those years ago. I remember Baloyi's studio in the sun, brightly coloured with a giraffe chair that one of the
children sat on, Jackson so proud this artist was his student, disappointed he wasn't there. The studio's still on
the tourist trail, and Jackson's, but both of them are dead. We haven't the
heart to go to Jackson's, it's a kind of unspoken understanding. But we decide
to visit Baloyi's.
It's hard to find from Elim. The Venda Sun
map is unspecific as so many of them are because proper maps just don't exist of this
area. We're driving most of the time on dirt roads in the direction of Giyani,
dipping into a fertile valley, houses everywhere of course, old lorries
belching fumes, more new 4x4s and other top of the range cars - they're lined
up in the car parks of every primary school.
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| At John Baloyi's studio |
John Baloyi was a good friend of Vohnani
Bila (poet who was with us at Christmas during our last visit) and died in a car crash. What a loss.
His studio is a fantasy world, a warren of small rooms
with painted walls, decorated with figures, patterns and in different rooms,
sculptures made from long twisted branches that seem to be everywhere here.
Walls with circular windows made out of car wheel hubs, large gaping faces or
bodies reaching upwards. A drum with a tail and legs, another shaped into a
crocodile. Orange walls with charcoal figures, a corner of local pots....the
studio goes on and on, wasps nests in corridors, until you come out past a
carving space to the front of the house where the walls glint with mirrors and
grey tiles, the steps are mottled yellow, black, ochre, green and his widow is
washing clothes in a bowl on the garden wall.
She is the woman who opened the metal gate
to us, asking nothing, quietly showing us the entrance and saying it was open.
The roof of a small roundhouse is falling
in and a rectangular window directs sun onto the floor. It could be a chapel in
a cathedral.
In the garden there's a line of statues,
grey with the weather, cracking or falling over. Nothing has been looked after.
Under a tree there's another pile of Venda pots and as we stand on the step and
chat, or rather, Risenga chats and we look, I see Baloyi's grave under an
orange tree in the garden, buried according to local tradition, on his own
land. His gravestone is polished, dark and light grey, the only thing in the
garden that seems to have been looked after.
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| Traditional pots at the studio |
It's such a depressing experience and
afterwards, we're back on the dirt road to look for some of the women potters
we saw with Jackson years ago. We ask a couple of women sitting in the shade of
a tree. Everyone we ask says straight on on, straight, second left. The
directions are never right.
But what we don't notice is a sign at a turn off
saying 13 km to the potters. It's not on the map. The pottery in Mashamba has
gone it seem, so we go to the Mukondeni Pottery.
Dust. A lorry passes and there's more of
it. Kids walking home from school are enveloped in it. It's on my skin, in my
nose, hair, fingernails.
Driving's hard and the car's rattling. At the tar road, heading back, we make for
Louis Trichardt. It's long, straight and burning by now, mid afternoon. R needs to
sort out his dongle, we need to find a Checkers for decaff coffee. We
buy deodorant that claims to work for 48 hours.
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| Women at the Mukondeni Pottery, Venda |
Outside a fish and chip shop is a bakkie
full of enormous cabbages, the biggest I've seen. There are obviously no slugs
here. And I haven't seen a pigeon.
The moon's virtually full and we have to
cook. Later, half asleep, I hear a massive wind like a vacuum cleaner around
the house, no warning, then it's gone. Tomorrow is Solomon's funeral and I
won't be there.