anja marais' photostream  

Marais creates Sculpture and assemblage work from multi layers of charcoal drawings and found objects. Her art is clearly a reflection of her provenance with the merger of colonial Victorian elements and African folklore. She states “ As a child I was wrapped in the sounds and smells of the bush and I am still haunted by its many folk tales, fables and by its spiritual, mysterious deities and gods”.

She uses non-traditional materials to celebrate a non- western cultural tradition. She uses paper and fabric consciously breaking away from the hard materials and large scales of traditional sculpture. She deliberately rejects those masculine materials and shapes for feminine ones. She exchange her welder for a needle and tread to assemble her sculptures. Her haunting animistic images contains the easy movement between the natural and supernatural, a basic assumption of African folklore. A journey is created into an enchanted universe that also has the reality of this world.

The viewer can transcend into a world of pristine innocence of carrousels, paper dolls, fables and dark promises of forgotten magic. Which is her intentions “I can not forget the many native songs and stories from my youth that lurk in my childhood memories of innocence and pure naivete and in my art I try to preserve this world.”

For more information on upcoming events and news on my art please visit my blog anjamarais.wordpress.com