In this research I consider ways in which black South African artists working during and after apartheid have both revised and symbolically redeployed the Stations of the Cross - and more broadly, the iconographic tradition of the Passion cycle. In so doing, I demonstrate the strategic application of Christ's episodic sufferings as a means of both analogously chronicling situations of historical trauma, as well as articulating more aspirant narratives of political resistance, selfliberation and reconciliation. Concentrating initially on church-commissioned projects realised in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I trace the reinterpretation (or 'Africanisation') of the Stations of the Cross by artists such as Bernard Gcwensa, Ruben Xulu and Sydney Kumalo. Noting the emergence of a black Christ and a localised Passion, I emphasise the complex cultural and political implications of this iconographic transformation - arguing that its hybrid realisation undermined the cultural bias of a European-styled Christianity, and the racial hierarchies of colonialism and apartheid. Following this, considered in more detail are the secular reimaginings of Sokhaya Charles Nkosi's Crucifixion (1976) and Azaria Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa (1995) - as series wherein the episodes of Christ's Passion are consciously and symbolically redeployed. In the case of Nkosi's Crucifixion, I show as covertly documented in a black Christ's sufferings the incarceration and torture of political activists in apartheid South Africa. On a more ideological level, I demonstrate also, as embodied in the series, the aspirant directives of Black Consciousness and Black Theology. Turning to Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa, I present its visual narrative as analogously envisioning, as well as critically rethinking, the mutually embedded traumas of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Significant to my analysis is the future vision of reconciliation posited by Mbatha, and the extent to which it both reflects and challenges that maintained within the 'transformative' programme of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Demonstrated in my evaluation of these appropriative projects is the way in which a traditionally European iconographic tradition is critically redeployed - in chronicling situations of historical trauma, as well as in the envisioning of alternative futures. As such, I hope to afford a more nuanced and challenging appreciation of these reimagined Passion narratives, as significant projects of cultural and postcolonial memory. In keeping with this, I advance in conclusion a 'rethinking of pilgrimage'. Recalling the culture of participative witness associated with devotional programmes like the Stations of the Cross, I propose that in the case of both Nkosi's Crucifixion and Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa, extended to viewers is a certain imperative: to imaginatively revisit, and rethink within the present, traumatic histories of black suffering and resistance.

When I was twenty-five I married a farmer from the Eastern Cape. I gave up living in a city, and saw myself spending the rest of my life in the country, involved in the concerns of mixed stock farming in a semi-arid region of South Africa. My life changed utterly when I was thirty-two with the sudden and unexpected death of my husband. I became again a city-dweller, a teacher, with three young children. The circumstances of my life have forced me to confront the reality of death, and to wrestle with the nature of my relationships with people whom I love, both those alive and those dead. The untimely death of my husband forced upon me a realisation of mortality, and an understanding that every relationship has a beginning and an end. Each relationship one has determines a role for oneself, as daughter, mother, wife, widow, as well as a changing understanding of one's own identity. Prior to embarking on this MFA, I had been working with clay, and reading in the history of ceramics. From my reading it was evident that the making of objects in clay had long been associated with burial practices in cultures all over the world. As my interest in making really large clay vessels grew I came to see that in making these vessels I could place myself as an object maker within this long tradition. In so doing I could make urns - funeral urns in a sense - that could memorialise my own relationships to specific individuals. Obviously, these vessels are funeral urns in a metaphorical sense only as these pots will never actually be used as burial vessels. Metaphorically they seek to symbolise our changing nature as individuals and to celebrate the lives which they represent and my relationships with the people concerned. Clay is an earth material, and because I was using this material I also wanted to make a connection with the earth itself, and with the life of humankind upon the earth. A physical death signals a major change in patterns of relatedness, but our lives are filled with little deaths, with change and resurrection, as we move towards our own experience of physical death. In a broader sense then I wish these vessels to speak also of the nature of this changing world, both the physical world which over geological time endlessly "dies" and is "resurrected ", and of the world of personal relationships where we find ourselves, changing inhabitants of this changing world. St Paul, the early Christian apostle, in writing to the church at Corinth, expressed this notion when he said, "I die every day" (1 Corinthians 15:31). I have called this exhibition Early 21st century funeral urns for the quick and the dead. Seven of the urns memorialise individuals, some dead, most not, each of whom is important to me. Two speak of a broader inevitable connection with the land, and of the part we play within the context of the changing nature of the landscape itself. In so doing I have attempted to construct a memorial for those relationships important to me. The urns thus serve as repositories of memory, as physical constructs which speak of relationship. The death of another person can radically change one's status and identity: in my case from farmer 's wife to widow, from country person to city-dweller, and now, as I present this exhibition, it seems to me to represent the current stage in my changing notion of who I am, from farmer's wife to artist. Who knows what deaths and resurrections lie ahead for us all?

Bibliography: leaves 76-86. / Racism is a phenomenon of inferiority. Our blackness is a phenomenon of pride. We are not out to hate Whites. We are out to treat them simply as people. The point, however, is that we can no longer care whether or not Whites understand us. What we do care about is understanding ourselves and, in the course of this task, helping the Whites to understand themselves. Now we are rejecting the idea their idea which unfortunately has also become deeply embedded in the souls of many of us - the idea that we live by their grace. We may live by the grace of God, but we do not live by the grace of the Whites. (Small, 1971)

Includes bibliographical references. / The focus of this dissertation is the establishment of various entry-points into my practical project, Postproduction (2007 -2009). My project entails re-printing Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction (2007) with outdated and superseded printing technology, specifically letterpress/movable type. The text is printed onto paper that was handmade from original copies of Postproduction . Standard letterpress ink was used in combination with a Vandercook 219 AB press for the printing. To compensate for the occurrence of various complications and errors during the production process there were three to five working copies of the book. After a Single volume was selected for presentation in the gallery space all the remaining copies of the text were destroyed.

This thesis focuses on the aesthetics of the photographic representation of the actual dead body in Elizabeth Heyert's The Travelers (2004), Pieter Hugo's The Bereaved (2005) and Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta's Life Before Death: Portraits of the Dying (2004). The use of portraiture in each of these artist's series is crucial as it suggests an interest in the 'subjectness' of the corpse. Katarzyna Majak's (2011) theory of socialization as an attempt to lessen the scandal of the corpse through representation is central throughout this thesis. Majak argues that for the viewer the corpse is a scandal, because it discomfortingly presents the transformation of a body from subject to object. For Majak, socialization is essentially the taming of the dead body, achieved by re-presenting the corpse as an individual. Socialization emphasizes the subject-ness of the deceased individual, rather than the object-ness of the corpse, of pure unadulterated matter. The use of portraiture in each of the above series socializes the corpse by presenting the individual identity of the deceased as a subject, in varying degrees. Death is approached through the recognizable conventions of portraiture itself, thereby to some extent taming or domesticating the corpse. This thesis expands on Majak's valuable theory by establishing a continuum of socialization from subject-ness to object-ness. Importantly, this continuum reveals varying degrees of socialization within the three series. Socialization is used here as an analytical tool with which to explore the photographs, drawing out similarities and differences. I argue that through various aesthetic techniques, these three series encourage the viewer to look at these different images of the corpse with varying degrees of comfort.

'Nothing’1 is frequently associated with insignificance. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'to reduce to nothing is to consider or treat as worthless or unimportant’. This project aims to reveal that this form of nothing is, essentially, something. As a child, I was told that my struggle with breath, with asthma, was nothing but psychosomatic. The heart of this project is a physical manifestation of a psychosomatic nothing, and the sense of personal insignificance implied by repetitive, unacknowledged housework. The overarching title, A Deeper Kind of Nothing, was garnered from theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing: Why there Is Something Rather than Nothing (2012) in which he explores the origins of our universe. In this book, he refers to nothing as the space that exists where something once was, an absence. He explains that 'all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing - involving the absence of space itself - and which may one day return to nothing’ (2012: 183). Krauss asserts that 'nothing is every bit as physical as something’, and this idea of a 'deeper nothing’ stirred my thinking. Nothing is one thing, but a deeper nothing, one that the universe may have arisen from, is quite another. Relating this to the impact of seemingly insignificant objects, events and feelings, nothing becomes something physical that is understood to be both tangible and generative of something new. It is this 'something new’, the outcome of what is considered 'nothing’, which is the deeper kind of nothing that this project presents. My reflections on generative nothingness have produced a series of performative processes: 1. Collecting - breaths, eggshells (the main materials of this body of work) and words 2. Working with breath, eggshells and words, on my own and with others 3. Conversing while painting eggshells. These methodologies are made manifest here in a book that is a record of the transcribed texts, short films, balloons, painted eggshells and boxes, bronzes and residue from a 'banquet’. Discarded eggshells and exhaled breaths are traces of the everyday that are typically overlooked. The dispensability inherent in both provides a basis from which to express real and imagined subjugation experienced by 'the good child’, 'the good wife’ and 'the good mother’: the child who felt shame for causing a fuss over her struggle to breathe and the wife who walked on eggshells.

Bibliography: leaves 63-68.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-40). / Further Fictions mediates a particular visual system - that of the screen. I have tried to unravel and grant materiality to this contemporary virtual coding of images using a process of translation: by evoking the inherent nature of the cinematic image in the medium of print.We live in an analogue reality. There is always a shift between an idea and its translation into a model, between the photograph and the reality of the event it references, between the drawing on a matrix and the print of that drawing on paper. In this project I have set myself the task of the translator by grappling with the elements of an image that defy translation from one medium to another.

In my art making I use paper as a primary material. I erode its materiality, perforating the surface in anticipation of whatever may be revealed, searching for new ways of seeing. What emerge are contradictory concepts: reduction and accretion. These mechanisms exist in counterpoise with one another yet the boundaries are blurred – indefinable. The fragile balances that operate within the mechanisms of power are similarly contradictory. It is here that this exploration resides, moving away from what has gone before – as Merleau-Ponty proposes above – taking an ongoing 'route', anticipating the possibility of new developments. papers from industry) and the use of repetition, my concerns are different to those of prominent Minimalist artists. I was first attracted to the visual impact of Minimalist works – and particularly intrigued by Richard Serra's black oil-stick drawings. The extreme reduction of visual and narrative means and a strong emphasis on materiality are central interests. A Minimalist approach to art making allows for reduction of 'noise' and elimination of excess. It pushes me out of my comfort zone of working in mixed media and familiar methodologies. Limitations of media intensify my focus and therefore require me to delve deeper, continuously striving to find and develop new possibilities, leading to new insights and engaging in a process of ongoing incremental unfolding. Fragile equilibriums, operating within complex processes of unconscious and conscious awareness – constantly shifting, adjusting and readjusting. Charcoal is the material that provides a strong link to my childhood place, and establishes a point of reference and departure for the narrative of this study. During my childhood our home was threatened on several occasions by fires in the koppie behind the house. These events were always strangely unifying experiences for our family − we pulled together, as a family, to keep the fires away from our house. Our successful efforts were always accompanied by a sense of achievement and elation, in contrast to the tense undercurrent that existed in our household. Somehow, we performed a balancing act − a fragile equilibrium − between holding something together, and that something falling apart. Throughout my artistic process the challenges remain: How to manipulate and exploit materials, process and formal considerations to say what I want to communicate? How does one give form to traumatic experience? My method in response is 'filtering' − the term offers collectively a concept, structure and process of production. Filtering serves as my concept from which to develop artworks. My choice of materials − charcoal as 'filter' and various kinds of paper used as both surface and support – act as a limit, a controlled framework within which to operate. These self-imposed limitations, to me, symbolically link to the limitations of women in a patriarchal society and the limiting structures and mechanisms of power. Through this body of work, I hope to create a new context and a symbolic 'place' for resistance, setting up new balances for power relations towards fulfilment − unknowing the known − and in the process a reconstitution and a reimagining of the self, embracing the unknown − the possibilities of a new known.

. / Avant Lounge Exotica is a project that explores the poetics of interior living spaces, specifically in relation to print media and magazine imagery. Throughout this project I have engaged with ideas around intimacy and interiority, and the sensory experience within a space. By creating imaginary environments and presenting different iterations of these spaces, I try to acknowledge the personal, psychological experience in a private interior. This interior is one that exists as part of a larger sociological context that is based on consumerist aspirations and displays of wealth.