A weekly round-up of South Africa’s creative community and projects by Between 10and5 includes 3 from Cape Town.
Cape Town model and character agency My Friend Ned
My Friend Ned is a Cape Town-based model and character agency, focused specifically on finding beautifully unusual and enigmatic characters who aren’t afraid to be themselves. It’s something of a collection of society’s beautiful misfits.
Casting director Candice Hatting founded the agency after becoming frustrated at being unable to find the type of talents her clients were asking for. “I constantly needed to street cast to crack it, so I decided to make a book of our own that was carefully curated with some of my most interesting friends,” she says.
The idea with My Friend Ned was, and still is, to cut away all the smoke and mirrors. Instead of a traditional test shoot, everyone is photographed in a plain white T-shirt with as little make-up as possible. Hatting says their goal was to “strip it all down and make an agency that was brave enough to let their differences really shine through”.
Claudette Schreuders: It’s in the Ambiguity
Claudette Schreuders’s stocky wooden figures stare blankly into the middle ground and offer the viewer nothing obvious while simultaneously hinting that there is much buried just beneath their enamelled surfaces.
Schreuders embraces this and other ambiguities in her work. The mythological mermaid creature that reoccurs symbolises this, as she explains: “I like the idea of a mermaid as a kind of lost girl, not at home in either land or water.”
Schreuders’s work has been exhibited widely locally and abroad, and is part of major collections. While her sculptures are static, they hint at an inner life. “People see motives and emotions in the figures that I don’t consciously put there,” says Schreuders, who keeps the faces of her sculptures quite neutral. “It’s a device that makes them more open and interesting.”
New techniques and themes in Russell Abrahams’s illustrations
Russell Abrahams is a young illustrator completing his final year of study in Cape Town. Since he began his studies, he has been honing his craft with an enthusiasm and zeal that saw him selected as one of Design Indaba’s emerging creatives.
Russell Abrahams
In the interim, his style has progressed significantly – new textures, techniques, colour schemes, subjects matter and influences are all present in his recent work. One such example is his ongoing Totem series, through which Abrahams tackles important social issues that South Africans are facing.
His country influences his work in many ways, even though this influences doesn’t always manifest itself in a way that is immediately obvious. “Most of the time I draw inspiration from people and pop culture. I love observing how people walk and talk,” says Abrahams, whose desire to keep on learning, experimenting and bettering his skill makes him one to keep an eye on going forward.
see full article in Mail & Guardian
