Sven Christian [SC]: Of all the works on exhibition, yours is unique in that it was created with a view towards an installation and performance. The largescale sculpture has since disintegrated, but what were your thoughts at the timeof making the maquette?

Farieda Nazier [FN]: I’ve got two other maquettes at home that I made to try and understand the final form of the bigger sculpture, and there were others that were kind of hyperrealistic. Some were created with a view to grow plants; literally sitting in front of the TV watching Netflix, thinking through things.

I modelled a lot of these on my own body. First it was about understanding the different angles of the form and what the body does from these different positions; understanding what the form does when you curl up like that. It feels a bit like a mannequin at the end of the day, assembling and reassembling it, trying to make sense of it.

I religiously made one or two of these every week — sometimes small, sometimes big. Sometimes I would use a cut-out drawing to think about how the form will relate to its surroundings. But without making the maquettes, I don’t think I could have envisaged it properly. Like, as a drawing, I couldn’t see it in space. I couldn’t see it as an installation, as another body, you know?

I could draw it to death, but I reach a point where I can’t draw it anymore. Then I move back and forth between the drawing and the making, understanding the relationship between the different elements. The maquette works quite well for that. You can feel it in your hand. Its form then evokes certain movements in you. So part of the performance was really based on this body in this position, where I’m sitting on my shins, like in a prayer position, kneeling over with my head on the ground. In the performance I mirror this gesture, so it means a lot for realising how one’s body interacts with space. I then try to find different ways to reflect what I’ve realised
as a maquette, in the way that I install, in the way that I move... It’s about building and iterating the thing over and over, but it can’t happen if there isn’t a maquette. Like, it really is the seed.

SC: I like that you use the word seed, because for me it’s basically the fetal position, even though, if you position the figure on its knees, as you say, the figure could be in prayer, but if you turn it on its side it’s fetal, so it conjures the idea of a fetus in the womb. At the same time, it’s packed. I remember the struggles of trying to take the large clay version out of the mould, and how much softer and more fragile it was. The difficulty of that transition was a thing.

FN: I remember. It was like having a very delicate baby, then killing it each time. Like spending all this time incubating something in this mould, this womb-like structure. The large sculpture was created in this horrible, horrible foam, which I carved and carved for two weeks. I then made a plaster mould, which was a hell of a messy process. At that stage, I was thinking about how I want to make this happen. It was either going to be clay or cement. There are a lot of different materials you can chuck into a mould, right? I was dead set on this clay, and of course clay behaves in a particular way — it’s so prone and responsive to its environment. During the moulding process it was freezing, and the clay was not drying. I asked you if someone could light a fire, and then the sun shone on the mould and the clay dried too fast in the workshop.

It was very, very difficult to work with the clay in those conditions, and at that scale, because it was cold and I underestimated the time it would take to be leather hard. It was stressful, but nothing I didn’t anticipate. I still pushed. I wanted to use this material, because of the association of terracotta to the skin, the ochre, and iron’s links to blood. So for me it really was quite a bodily thing, this link between the body and the soil.

I also wanted to use clay because it could disintegrate. At some point I thought I would fire it in sections, so it would break in any case and I would need to put it back together. All of these things were possible, but it would mean that, at the end of the day, once fired, things would shrink at different rates and when you put the pieces together again they would no longer fit. It was a very technical exercise. As much as I could anticipate what was going to happen, at the end of the day, the process would determine what the object was going to be. I’d made peace with it, and I wanted to see what would happen, packing the clay in an inch-thick layer inside this mould, letting it dry, then breaking it into pieces so that it could be removed from the mould. It still needed to be rebuilt around the tree, so that it would look like a tree was either growing through it, breaking it apart, or growing from it; that it had some kind of association with its surroundings.

The performance unfolded in a similar way. I’d rehearse a couple of times in studio at UJ. When you rehearse in a studio versus rehearsing on site, again, it’s a different ball game. You respond differently to the environment. The ground feels different. You walk differently. Your gait is very different. You breathe differently. Your posture is different... You’re at the mercy of your environment.

SC: Talking about performance, how would you relate the experience of rehearsing to making a maquette?

FN: That’s a great analogy — the maquette as a rehearsal. It is similar, because you are literally practicing the form, becoming accustomed to moving yourself in a particular way, to moving a material in a particular way, to achieve a goal. The same thing happens when you’re performing.

Doing a dress rehearsal is much closer to the end product than a maquette. You’re within the site where you’re going to perform, whereas a maquette allows for much more flexibility, because you’re working at a tiny scale. I often work with miniatures because of my jewellery background. Sometimes, when I want to quickly test something, to get it out of my head or to get a sense of it in space, then I’ll make it. That maquette took me two-and-a-half hours. Then I was like, ‘Ok, this is how it works. Let me do it again. Let me try different proportions.’ A maquette is an amazing tool if you want quick results.

The technique differs too, between a maquette and a larger object. I never make a scale model in exactly the same way. The final figure that I casted felt like a maquette too, in a way, because I really was just testing it and hoping for the best. Then again, you can only really do that when you have a mould, so it depends on one’s process and technique. It’s a type of rehearsal, but it’s not, in many ways. I would say maquette making is a more conceptual process than a rehearsal. It happens earlier on.

SC: Yes, it feels like a rehearsal is about motor memory; finding a way to memorise your lines, so that you can act more freely in the moment, or make things instinctive. Maquette making could be similar, in the way that you might make multiples, and working in clay, you’re still physically involved, but at the end of the day you can let go of the maquette and move on, whereas a rehearsal seems like something you can’t not imbibe.

FN: From a technical perspective, the maquette was very different from the actual sculpture. Because of the scale it was solid and had a tiny cavity on the inside. The clay was an inch thick. When you scale it up it becomes fragile — now there’s a void on the inside, which changes everything. Now there’s gravity to contend with. You can’t necessarily work with clay like that at that scale, because the walls would be thirty centimetres thick. It wouldn’t ever dry, would crack, and wouldn’t look at all like a figure. Unless you’re making micro- gestures in your rehearsal (versus actual gestures) it can be difficult to compare, because it’s so dependent on mirroring it and then scaling it up.

SC: The maquette is small and hard but there was also something about the way that the larger version came unstuck that I liked. It became so fragile.

FN: Scaling it up made it like flubber, because everything is pulling outwards and gravity is pulling inwards. You saw how it collapsed under its own weight. I found that really incredible, as a process. Frustrating at times, because I didn’t always want to do that, but these things are fascinating to me. The final work had a mannequin feel about it. The texture, the feel, everything. You can’t see how it will turn out until it’s to scale. With maquettes, everything scales up. The risk scales up, the space it occupies will scale up, its stature will scale up... Also time, you know? There’s an increased investment required when you scale something up. The weight of things. It’s like you’re tired at the end. Whereas the little one is very contained, manageable, doable. You’re just there on your couch, cuddling up against a little cushion, quickly forming it with your fingers. When it’s small, those things don’t matter so much. That’s the whole point. That’s why you do it. You don’t want to invest in something that’s going to kill you, so you dip your toe in the water and you’re like, ‘Ok, maybe.’ Then you climb in and it’s like, ‘Oh my God!’