Wearing a simple white tee and a trusty slash of Ruby Woo, Gum’s talking slowly and deliberately about success. But it’s not a version of success we often hear. She’s not climbing ladders or eyeballing ceilings. Rather, she’s talking about progress which is steeped in black consciousness, beautiful stories and a masterful grasp of colour and composition.
A self-portraitist – the kind of job made possible largely by Instagram – Gum’s signed to the Christopher Moller Gallery in Cape Town and is courting a global audience of art investors who spend up to $3 000 for one print from her absorbing collections of photos. A film student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, she was the only African artist at the Pulse Contemporary Art Fair in New York in March, which nominated her as a solo “artist of distinction”. The trip was made possible by the Design Indaba and the Adidas brand, which is an official admirer of her work and intends collaborating with her this year.
Her series include uTwiggy, a set of ironic, long-lashed self-portraits awash in pale pastel strokes. For Milked in Africa, Gum (it’s pronounced goom) turns a Tretchikoff brush painted emerald green on herself, trying to stem a spill of milk from her breasts. In the Free Da (think Frida) series, she preens deliciously under a crown of proteas and a unibrow. Her best-known work, the powerful Black Coca-Cola series, went viral last year, with people all over the world resonating with her black feminist spin on the iconic brand. She cradles it like a baby in a sarong wrapped around her chest. In another image, two Coke cans are perched like perky rabbit ears on her head, with a bow tie around her neck and a silk corset completing the image of a Playboy pin-up. She tackles self-identity in a way that reclaims the black female body in a proud, often retro African aesthetic.
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