Faith’s images reconstruct lost objects, broken-down cars, old factories and dusty side roads of forgotten towns. She investigates how humans interact with their environment, what scratches and memories they leave behind. Her interactions resonate with our fragility, with our innate understanding of symbols, dreams, textures and inevitable impermanence.
Faith47 is a self taught artist, best known for her graffiti and street art. While her home and studio are based in Cape Town, the artist is a seasoned traveler, spending much of her time exploring the world and creating art based on compelling and touching experiences with the people and places she encounters. November 2011 saw her back in Johannesburg where she spent some time working in studio at DKW, Arts on Main. She developed a suite of monoprints that originated from a combination of woodblock print and monotype techniques.
On a recent trip to Greece, she was inspired by an abandoned car featured in the first monoprint. The image, for her, resonated with the economic situation and the general mood of the country at the time. The broken down car is accompanied by the Greek slogan, which translates to “wake up and fight or bow down and pray”.
The pack of wolves is a reworking of a painting she did on a wall in Slovakia earlier this year. She describes the energy of the animals as reflecting an energy that we each hold internally. That violent surge is expressed in society, particularly in South African society, with a certain wild, untamed animalistic charge.
In between making the monoprints in the workshop, Faith also painted a large mural at the crossing of Goud and Main Street, not far from Arts on Main. The mural developed from an artwork on wood, called power and enlargement, created in her studio in Cape Town. The tiger image and title reference the fliers often seen pasted on walls and signs around town advertising North African doctors and their promises of returning lost lovers and medicines for penis enlargement. Her studio work and street art seem to co-exist symbiotically. In the same way that the artworks emanate from her travels and urban experiences, they find their way back onto street walls, inspiring and reflecting the people that see it every day.
Faith says, “My experiences painting on the street have bled over into my studio work and into these prints, bringing in the moods and textures of the urban environment as well as the scrawlings, sentences, poems and texts that are left behind by disenfranchised homeless people, stowaways and gangs tags that I’ve been documenting over the past few years.”
Incorporated text courtesy of Faith47The prints are now available at David Krut Projects, Arts on Main. For more information, please call the gallery on 011 334 1208/09 or email [email protected]