Enfold

Southern Guild is pleased to present Enfold, a solo exhibition of felted sculpture and charcoal drawings by mixed-media artist Christine Jacobs. The abundant landscape of the artist’s family farm – and the symbiotic interchange between the land and its inhabitants – is at the conceptual root of Enfold.

Located in the Xhariep District of Trompsburg, the Jacobs’ farm has been in the artist’s family for six generations, producing fine Merino wool that is scoured, spun and plied after being sheared from the land’s resident sheep. Energetically tied to the nostalgic terrain of her childhood, Jacobs’ practice responds to the symbolic significance of this environment, engaging with both the physical and non-physical traces of transformation and exchange that articulate this generational reciprocity with familial farmland.

The artist’s sculptural forms are made using Merino wool sourced from the farm. Through a traditional process of felting, individual fibres are matted together by hand to craft a pliant, insulating fabric that is naturally moisture-resistant. The sculptures’ low-slung, twisting shapes mimic the expansive, undulating terrain of the Xhariep landscape. Each draped in a pale outer shell of felted wool, their naturally dyed underbellies echo the reddened, mineral-laden soil. Black wool has been needle-felted into fine linear markings on the undersides – evoking the borders of demarcated territories, shifting trails of local herds and man-made roads and paths tracked into the earth.

The sculptures demand a deeply somatic engagement from Jacobs, as she wrestles with, manipulates, climbs and crawls into their forms during construction. Each "scape" is moulded to the artist’s own body. The hollows, soft crevices and coves offer intimate experiences of shelter for the figure to engage with. Though each form is a singular entity, the varied works are able to be configured and assembled into intuitive constellations.

The use of charcoal in the artist’s large-scale drawings is an allegorical choice. In 2021, a fire tore through the Jacobs’ farm reducing swathes of life-giving grassland to deadened ash. Made through prolonged exposure to heat, charcoal retains the regenerative potential energy to create. The exhibition’s two-dimensional works – the largest standing at 3 meters wide – are a reflexive exploration of line and gesture. Their impressions, marks and erasures reflect the tension between the constructed and organic, the seen and unseen. The abstracted drawings can be read as densely imagined topographies; some markings appear to trace the loose unfolding of a river or the texture of hoof-trodden earth while other more intrusive incisions echo the parameter of a wall or the engineered curvature of a road.

The body of work includes Jacobs’ first foray into photography. The artist dug a circular hollow into the land, forming a concave impression of her own bare body. Photographed with a drone, Jacobs’ figure is captured coiled within the ground amid an expanse of encompassing earth.
Enfold manifests a myriad of developments in Jacobs’ practice, expanding on the artist’s commitment to refined materiality and her curious exploration of interior and exterior worlds.