your life
centre, Anne-Ghrett Erasmus, asked me to exhibit my work. It was very encouraging, says Elsibe. She immersed herself in the works of Afrikaans poets like Antjie Krog, Ingrid Jonker, W E G Louw and A D Keet and started using their words in her art. It can easily take up to four months to complete one artwork, as with my other work commitments I can embroider only four words a day. You become deeply involved with a poem when you sit with it for so long ‒ you see new meanings and it talks to you on another level, she says. Although she writes poetry herself and has had her work published (under the name Elsibe Loubser), she prefers to honour other poets with her fabric art. We have such wonderful artists, I want to pay tribute to them and make them accessible to
the public in a visual way. Elsibe is also the patron of the Busy Beez, a local upliftment project where women from the community do traditional, conventional embroidery. The women are hugely inspiring and it feels as if they are my own aunts. When I sometimes get stuck with a difficult stitch, Gwen Thóle, their leader, or one of the other women helps me out. Elsibe says her mother, Suzanne Schreuder, had a significant influence on her life and work, but it was her father, Christo, who was the artistic one. He enjoyed knitting, baking cakes and taking wedding photos, she says. He did batiks and travelled overseas a lot. For their honeymoon, my parents visited Thailand and one of their purchases ‒ a small, typically Thai-style embroidered artwork ‒ still
hangs in my house today. Roddy has also provided her with inspiration. When they met, she was crazy about the ethnic embroidered Mexican fabric that she found among his things. I immediately had to pull it over a hoop and hang it on the wall; it was so gorgeous! Roddy s love for texture has definitely influenced my work. I find it wonderful that he also has an artistic side. During a trip to Zanibar in 2003, the Muslim men in their embroidered cotton clothes in Stonetown made a huge impression on her. These days I find it interesting that so many men have influenced my embroidery work when it is, traditionally, a feminine art form. Embroidery art, for me, has a real fragility ‒ it makes me think of Sleeping Beauty who pricked her finger with the needle.
Contact Elsibe McGuffog via the Breytenbach cultural centre in Wellington, 021 873 2786, breytenbachsentrum.co.za. In June, her work is part of a new exhibition at the centre titled BLOU/BLUES. July/August 2018 IDEAS 97