“EVERYONE looked at me like I deserved not to be born,” recalls Lizette Chirrme of her childhood. The Mozambican artist, whose exhibition A Sinfonia da Alma Liberta II(Sounds of a Free Soul) opens at Worldart Gallery this week, tends not to beat around the bush in recounting her past. Belying her brightly patterned textile art defined by bold animated abstract shapes that evoke celebration is a painful journey. She makes it clear that she can’t begin to talk about her art without touching on her childhood – the two are inextricably intertwined. Or perhaps skirting the truth isn’t her way. As we sit in her Observatory studio, on the first floor of a charming old Victorian building in this Cape Town suburb, the Mozambican artist lays herself bare.
“My stepmother beat me and forced me to do things, clean, look after the family. I was like a slave, ” she declares matter-of-factly.
It was at the age of seven that her life turned into a nightmare. Her father left her biological mother and took Chirrme from her birthplace, Nampula, and settled in Maputo with her stepmother. As part of Samora Machels’ security detail her father was seldom around and she was vulnerable to her stepmother’s abuse. She grew up alone and dejected.
“I had this deep sorrow inside me,” she recalls. This ‘sorrow’ may have been her cross to bear, however ironically it appears to have also contained the seed of her liberation from her painful childhood and negative self-image. It propelled her to heal herself and led her to become an artist.
“I was unhappy and felt like I had this calling to do something, but wasn’t sure what. I wanted to change myself and change how people saw me.”
Unexpectedly, this is what drew her to making art with hessian. She could identify with this everyday, disposable, rough textile used to transport coffee beans and potatoes.
“In Mozambique they use it as mats after rain to clean their feet. That is what people would do with me, they would clean off their shit on me.”
In transforming hessian fabric into something beautiful, collectable and decorative Chirrme, somehow felt she would be able to rewrite her identity, her destiny even. Or at least that is how she views it now and explains her art to herself, the world. Art making is forever grounded in a set of beliefs. In the absence of any formal art training Chirrme had to invent her own narrative to substantiate what she did or why she did it. Art was not a fashionable career option for her, but a redemptive tool.
Her hessian creations evolved into art works, hanging textile ones that found favour in Mozambique. She quit her banal office day job and dedicated herself to her distinctive textile art. The hard edges of her painful past began to soften, though ultimately, she felt she had to leave Mozambique to be free of it.
“It was difficult, everything and everybody reminded me of everything. My feelings were boiling over all the time. I don’t think of Mozambique as an accommodating place for me.”
It was in Cape Town, where she settled in 2005, that she eventually found a space to grow as a person and artist – opportunities for artists are limited in Mozambique.
She had staged two exhibitions in Maputo and they had been noticed, she sold work, but there were few commercial galleries. A residency at Greatmore Studios brought her into local Cape Town art circles.
Her rise has been gradual and only now is it paying dividends. She will present work at the 1:54: Contemporary African Art Fair in London in October. And she is now staging her first solo exhibition in South Africa at WorldArt Gallery. A Sinfonia da Alma Liberta II(Sounds of a Free Soul) consists of a new body of large-scale textile-driven works.
In appealing to galleries, who were concerned about the longevity of the hessian fabric, she now realises her work on conventional canvases and works with printed fabrics with different connotations.
Her art is defined by abstract forms, hinting at the human body through the recurring motifs of hands and feet. These anthropomorphic forms could be read as distorted bodies – perhaps echoeing this skewed self-image Chirrme had to confront. These abstract ‘bodies’ are created from collages of printed fabrics from Shweshwe to other so-called African prints associated with dress on the continent. In this way the clothed body and the self collapse into a single form, implying that public self, the mask can be imprinted on the psyche, or the other way around in Chirrme’s experience.
The collage mode she has adopted fittingly shows how she has used art and textiles to ‘restitch’ herself and transcend her painful upbringing. “I feel 95% healed. I see myself and love myself. I don’t need other people to love me to accept myself,” she says.
Art alone wasn’t the only redemptive force; she attributes yoga retreats and long walks in the mountain as contributing towards her healing. In other words she relied on some quintessential Cape Town ‘medicine’.
The hard leather lines that snake around the bold printed collages speak of this contained confident persona that has emerged.
The animated shapes evoke the titular ‘sounds’ of this new being that Chirrme has crafted. “You need to be yourself, free yourself. Dance with your own sound inside. Just be and find acceptance with yourself,” she urges.
She doesn’t plan her compositions; she spontaneously follows the line that she believes flows from within. In this way her art reflects the vicissitudes of her inner being, capturing her state of mind each time she creates a work.
“This is the way I feel most comfortable communicating,” she says of her textile medium. Having found her redemption through these animated forms, she hopes to help viewers find and embrace themselves. Or maybe celebrate the ways in which hardships have shaped them, finally empowering them as has been the case with Chirrme.
A Sinfonia da Alma Liberta II shows at Worldart Gallery until September 29.