MARK RAUTENBACH | Tending the Courtyard

MARK RAUTENBACH | Tending the Courtyard

10 September – 4 October 2025

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Can one think about or describe your work as deconstructed tapestry? Does that response to your work resonate with you?

Deconstructed tapestry and textiles. There are many things to unravel with these traditional art and craft forms. Beginning  with a play on the word “yarn” to describe the notion of a story or narrative, but also one of my primary materials – and then the many interpretations of meanings that can emerge from these traditions.

It interests me to get to the fundamental principles of things, hence deconstruction, the weft and the warp of fabric. What happens when there's only warp and no weft, and vice versa? What happens when there's just colour, tone and texture, and no image?

The cascading threads call to mind rivers of life illuminated by an invisible sun. Do you see your works as symbolic of life forces, of rivers, landscapes, journeys and connecting threads?

My Ad Hominem series, evoke images of various natural phenomena, from a micro- to a macro level - blood capillaries, lightning, aerial views of rivers, cross sections of soil strata. Although the work is non-representational, it's difficult to not see things in them. I like to think of the work as Rorschach tests, scrying devices, that draw things out of the viewer's imagination. The viewer completes the work.

I love the idea that sewing thread, the material I work with, is a material that invisibly holds things together. The work nudges the viewer into becoming aware of how we make things up, we make up stories, we see things that aren’t actually there. That these stories invisibly hold our realities together.

Colour curation is a key element of your work. Can you talk about your choice of colour and how you select the combination of threads of various hues to make your work?

I carefully select colour and tones, meticulously grading and contrasting them. I'm fascinated by transitions. When does green-become-turquoise-become-blue? When is it no longer green? How green changes and is influenced by the colours around it. And how it affects the colours it surrounds or into which it is placed.

I mostly draw colour schemes from things I see about me, often objects from nature like plants and animals. I am also interested in how we actually see things, failing eyesight, how looking through spectacles, distorts and enhances seeing. And then there's what is colour, actually? There's the pigment and the dye, but where and when is it colour?

It seems that there may be an unexpected element; an element of chance to your work, which is integral to your making. Can you talk about this?

This is a constant reminder that I'm not in charge, that control is an illusion. An illusion I'm pretty attached to. I believe that there's an animating spirit that gets channeled through artists. Artists are facilitators, and the more I get out of the way, the smoother the flow. Chance is an excellent way of facilitating this. I structure things and play with material so that this can happen.

Formally I use chance as an element to contrast with the other meticulous, rigorously-controlled elements.

Sheila Hicks and others have been important influences in your practice. Can you elaborate on this?

I draw much courage and inspiration from Sheila Hicks and Judith Scott as well as the women in Greek mythology, Penelope, Ariadne and Arachne. With them, I feel a sense of belonging and fellowship. That I'm in a stream of creativity that has been flowing long before me and will continue long afterwards. I understand why and how they do things. The techniques they use, their approaches. I feel understood by them when I see their work. I only recently became aware of them.

For many decades, I was working very much in the dark and felt quite isolated working with ‘unorthodox’ materials. It feels to me that fabric, fibre and textiles have only really received acceptance in the contemporary art scene this millennium -  even though humans have always been making art with them.

Mark Rautenbach conversation with gallery director, Georgie Shields, April 2025

Born in 1964 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, Mark Rautenbach is a Cape Town-based artist who works in a variety of media, including textiles, paper and materials which are widely considered waste matter. His practice is often process-based and draws on traditional craft techniques.

This is Rautenbach’s first solo exhibition with Everard Read London.

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