Keeper of the Hearth: The Art of Gwen van Embden

(Author: Ute Ben Yosef, Vol. 70, No. 3, Chanukah 2015)

“It is about what’s left over”1

Gwen van Embden’s creativity centres in her search for the self. Her visual language ranges from conceptual and performance art to silver pen drawing and painting in oil. Artefacts relating to her identity as a woman are excavated from her personal past and from the depth of her sub-conscious. She presents them as mnemonic devices, inviting the viewer to share with her in an act of visual participation.

Van Embden is distinctly South African, having absorbed the socio-political history of the country with its pains and triumphs from the era of institutionalised racial segregation to her profound experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She participates in acts of healing in her curatorship of exhibitions and through her art.

Gwen was born in Pretoria, the fourth of six children of Walter Murray Adcock and Shirley Joyce, née Bower. Walter Adcock was a cartographer. During WWII, he served in the Allied forces in the British surveying corps of the 8th Army under General Bernard Montgomery and participated in the famous Battle of El Alamein. His strategic maps of North Africa are characterized by a unique sense of vista, capturing intricate detail with a macroscopic and microscopic perspective. During most of the war, he was stationed in Italy. After his marriage to Shirley, he worked in Pretoria as a town planner and dairy farmer.

Gwen studied and qualified as a nurse. In her relationship with her mother, which during her childhood was strained, religion had played an ambivalent role. She took the decision to embrace Judaism, and gladly submitted herself to the rhythm of ritual observance of her new faith. In 1980, she married Marco van Embden and was accepted and welcomed by his Orthodox family. She has supported him in all his communal involvement, including his chairing the United Herzlia Schools and the United Jewish Campaign. They have three children, Casey, Jacques and Sam.

Ever restless in her search for answers, Gwen began to study in the humanities, majoring in philosophy and graduating with a B.A. (Phil) at the University of South Africa in 1990. Her studies opened her mind to a new world of critical thinking. She was influenced by the existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and his work on freedom and responsibility and on man’s conscious process of self-transcendence. A further major impact came from Sartre’s life-long companion, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), whose writings about the secondary role assigned to women by social customs and institutions contributed greatly to the feminist movement.

Gwen’s penchant for scientific thought was guided by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whose work on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the human mind and the limits of factual language had a profound impact on her thinking. But the philosopher who influenced her most profoundly was Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Algiers, Derrida’s vast writings and teachings on deconstruction went beyond the confines of traditional philosophical thought. He deconstructed accepted ideas of aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, law, gender, racial differences and, most especially, political theory. He studied the concept of identity under which the worst violence of xenophobia, antisemitism and religious fanaticism was unleashed during the 20th Century. Derrida also participated in political activities. He spoke out forcefully against antisemitism, the death penalty, nuclear weapons, apartheid and Mandela’s imprisonment. His integration of thinking with action would impact on Gwen’s future work.

The discovery of Gwen’s artistic inclination happened suddenly. A family trip to Mauritius coincided with a spell of incessant rain, driving the family into a daily practice of drawing and engaging with art. There they discovered books on the world’s art treasures. From that point onwards Gwen, Casey and Jacques became absorbed in the urge to creativity, an urge which led Gwen to enrol in the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Art in 1989.

Return to the Source

In his book Mandala, Carl Gustav Jung2describes the individuation process undergone by one of his patients, an American intellectual who at the age of 55 had reached her limit of self-understanding. Throughout her life she had enjoyed a strong relationship with her father but had little rapport with her Danish mother. Before going to Zurich to consult with him, she made a detour to Denmark and began to paint the countryside, which filled her with immense satisfaction. One of her paintings depicts a vision in which her lower torso is stuck in the earth, while she clings to a cliff by the sea. When Jung saw the painting, he encouraged her to create a follow-up. In the second image, her outline erupts into a sphere within a flash of lighting. The lightning to her was the rod of Moses bringing forth the waters of life. Under the analysis of Jung, she painted a remarkable mandala series (the vision of her ‘self’). Jung indicated that only after re-connecting with her mother could her path of individuation commence.

Gwen van Embden had a similar experience at the point in her life when she started her fine art studies at the Michaelis Art School. She had begun to feel that her “past and the future of that past”3 had left a gap in her life. Wanting to confront challenges, she began her search into this other past which she felt she had suppressed. Marco became a positive driving force in her journey and he urged her to reconcile with her mother. So, in her old age Shirley Joyce came to live in their home with their family and a new bond of love and understanding developed between mother and daughter.

For her Master of Fine Art’s thesis,4 awarded cum laude, Gwen assembled artefacts of the life of her mother and father. The theme of the project was focused on identity and memory and follows her autobiographical path. It highlights the question of how her identity was constructed by “using myself as a women, convert and mother as the subject”.5

The thesis is entitled: “Blue Mary: Handwork for keeping the House”. Its embroidered, digitally photographed sub-title reads: “The maid is not dead but sleepeth. Gwendoline”.

The work is based on her parallel between displays in a public museum and in a home. The meaning constructed in both is, according to Gwen, distilled into ideology. In both, museum and home, truth is unearthed through the narrative of life. Gwen’s home narrative stretches over three generations of women, her mother’s, her own and that of her daughter. Stitched wall hangings, hand embroidery, crockery and family photographs constitute the maternal side of her work.

Blue Mary

The title of Gwen’s thesis refers to Mary, the Christian mother of God with her traditional blue mantle. In her image manifested within the tradition of Western art, the archetype of the Great Mother has come to assert itself.6Mary (Maria) is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Miriam. In the Hebrew Bible, Miriam the Prophetess is the elder sister of Moses and Aaron. A woman of vision, dreams and ecstasy, she is concerned with life in the face of death, with survival and with continuity.7 Miriam’s namesake of the Christian era has given birth to the godhead and become part of his numinous presence. Her iconography in Western art has undergone metamorphoses from early medieval times to the modern age. During the Middle Ages she is the personification of divine wisdom and is depicted as regal, majestic and withdrawn. In the Gothic era her image is the epitome of beauty, of the unreachable female ideal mirroring the courtly age of the troubadour. More and more her features begin to radiate love and motherliness. Gradually she becomes the mother of all, bestowing her protection on lowly people sheltered under her blue mantle. At this point she comes to stand outside the New Testament tale and the liturgical cult of the church. As in the pièta figures, her person becomes a devotional image, representing a mythical being. Thus, unobtrusively, she comes to embody the Great Mother as conceived in man’s collective sub-conscious, but appears under the guise of institutionalised religion. As the figure of mercy she connects ever more closely with the viewer in her female presence. In the concept of the worshipper she has become the divine intercessor between the supplicant and the distant, unapproachable patriarchial godhead. This is how Gwen van Embden regards the figure of Mary, and how she identifies with her.

In her thesis, a reproduction of the painting The Adoration of the Magi by Andrea Mantegna (1500, Getty Museum, US) is featured. Mary shows her infant to the three legendary wise men from the East, Casper, Melchior and Balthazar, who present their royal gifts, gold, incense and myrrh, to the infant godhead. This figure of the Madonna has for Gwen become a manifestation of an unexpressed subliminal feeling, “a kind of sublimation of my guilt and power in making this book”.8

“Memorializing Myself through my Mother”

One of the digital photographs in the thesis is entitled ‘Memorializing Myself through my Mother’. It is the recording of a performance, of body art, in which the artist represents herself as the subject and the object, using her body as a living tool. The influence of Joseph Beuys (1921-86) is evident in this and other of Gwen’s conceptual works. He was a leading figure in the avant-garde art in Germany during the 1970s and stood between conceptual art and performance art. In conceptual art works the emphasis is shifted from the art object to the idea which it embodies. As Professor of Fine arts at the Düsseldorf academy, he liberated his students by extracting from them their own statements based on actions around a personal narrative. Joseph Beuys himself became somewhat of a cult figure. His life, from his youth as a pilot in the Luftwaffe in WWII, how he was shot down in the Crimea and his mythical rescue by Tartars who purportedly saved his life by rubbing his frozen body with fat and covering him with felt, was related over and over again in his performances. He enjoyed a vast resonance among young artists, who transformed their own life’s experiences by means of conceptual statements and performance art.

‘Memorializing Myself through my Mother’ lasted for three days. During that time, Gwen physically identified with her mother, whose life was filled with embroidery work for the embellishment of her home. Her artist-daughter, by way of a ritual act, had the shape of a heart embroidered onto her chest. This was entrusted to a plastic surgeon, who first had to be taught the art of cross stitch and then to carry this out on her skin.