Mage

Southern Guild presents Mage by Justine Mahoney, a new body of work delving into the tangled web of transformation from adolescence to adulthood. Mage offers nine bronze sculptures and collages for her second solo with the gallery, coinciding with Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

Based in Cape Town, Mahoney is a figurative sculptor working in bronze whose cadre of hybridised characters, antiheroes and archetypes present an alternative mythology for our times. Her figures emanate from her own imagination and experience, brought to life through a range of visual references that is encyclopaedic in scope – encompassing vintage science fiction films, Neo-Classicism, ’80s magazine and pop culture, children’s toys, traditional African sculpture, erotica, graphic novels and snapshot photography. A voracious collector of ephemera and digital imagery, Mahoney begins her process by making photo collages that stitch together these contrasting worlds.

“Personal myth-making” is how she describes her work. She says: “Stories are a vehicle to help us through the lessons and trials of life. Their wisdom can guide us through the terrain of initiation. My most recent work, however, seeks to embrace the totality within – the darkness and imperfection together with the light.”

Many of the works in Mage are transgressive, tracing the dialectical forces that the artist has witnessed in her own adolescent daughters, but which she sees in all of us – power and vulnerability, desire and self-protection, brokenness and healing.

In this sense, her latest group of characters take after the protagonist Ged in author Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged is a young mage (wizard or sorcerer) who must defeat, or finally be consumed by, the shadow creature he unwittingly releases one night – still in his formative years of schooling – in an act of prideful display during a magical duel with his rival. The coming-of-age book was a major influence on Mahoney as a child.

Mahoney approaches each body of work as a progression. Her first collection, Innocence, dealt with both the playfulness and terrors of childhood while her second series, Tainted – a sell-out success – traversed themes of identity related to early adolescence. Mage enters more ambiguous territory, exploring the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

She notes: “I want to capture the transformation of growing up. There is pain in letting the veil of innocence fall, but there is majesty and self-mastery in embracing all that we are too.”