Umdiyadiya

UMDIYADIYA is inspired by collective memories and seeks to track historical events in a black household during turbulent past. The Installation encompasses a hand sewed mutton cloth, bandages, and notes attached reflecting on experiences with family and friends. Encountering kindness and softness within rough and uncomfortable spaces and situations, the work suggests that there can be love in spaces you might consider “broken” and that, in some instances, beautiful memories were made there which deserve to be remembered.

UMDIYADIYA: THE MATERIALS 

I use bandages, paper, and mutton cloth. These materials are soft yet heavy, they can absorb strong substances and leave traces when meet any foreign object. These materials have been selected as a caution point. When look at someone with a bandage on, you constantly position yourself in a place of kindness. I am fascinated by materials that have loved longer, they have somehow ability to remind us to pause and feel. 

UMDIYADIYA: COLLABORATION

The process of creating these works is empowered by real life stories that forge new directions in the face of various of marginalisation and exclusion from public and socials spaces. From the research to the production stage, my creative activities seek for ways to reimagine our lives, reveals how art can be used a tool for coping mechanism and how close we relate into it. This is done by involving ordinary people to contribute to the making of the art, using organic materials, materials that have lived longer and have a significant role in our lives.

Review: https://artthrob.co.za/2021/07/19/veiled-social-commentary-wezile-mgibes-umdiyadiya/