Jemma Mckenzie
BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS DEGREE, HONOURS
Michaelis School of Fine Art
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Photography / Sculpture / Installation/Sculpture
My location: Cape Town, South Africa
Jemma Mckenzie
First Name: Jemma
Last Name: Mckenzie
University / College: Michaelis School of Fine Art
Course / Program: BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS DEGREE, HONOURS
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Photography / Sculpture / Installation/Sculpture
My Location: Cape Town, South Africa
About
Born and raised in Mpumalanga, South Africa, Jemma Mckenzie relocated to Cape Town to study at the Michaelis school of Fine Art UCT, graduating in 2022. Growing up in the bushveld around Mpumalanga has nurtured a deep appreciation for the natural landscapes that she calls home. This love for the environment has become a central theme in her practice as she engages in notions of the anthropocene.This theme in her practice revolves around the spaces we, as humans inhabit and the memories they hold. She engages with these landscapes by collecting the remains left behind by human impact on the environment. These salvaged materials that are refigured in her artworks carry with them the traces of the landscapes from where she found them. These traces create dialogues within her works that are a continual source for her creative inspiration.Painting with dug up mining minerals, sculpting with salvaged mining debris, and capturing these ghostly landscapes through film photographs are some of the ways that she intuitively engages with the earth through her art making.
This body of work depicts the ‘weight of air’ occupying a landscape where the very act of breathing enacts a slow violence. How will we move through time when this air becomes too heavy to breathe? My practice offers a method to tangibly encapsulate the experience of occupying this ghostly space, where the air is laden with dust from centuries past. The photographs depict blurred black and white landscapes. The film’s grain is mimetic of the weighted dust clouds that haunt the air. Macabre silhouettes of machine- like monsters loom within these chilling scenes. So too are the sculptures shaped from the dust and debris salvaged from around these mines. Their material memory hosts a dialogue that engages directly with the landscape. These sculptures are vessels that hold the residual traces of histories and traumas from the spaces they came from. Through processes of salvaging debris, and reconstructing discarded waste, I captured the foreign and faraway in the desolate spaces of a mine I grew up near. This informed my sculptural and photographic practice, where I was able to reimagine the forms and found objects that I unearthed from heavy soil. Through this, I tell their stories long forgotten.
Competitions
