An Enthusiastic Conversation with Justine Mahoney
courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
Justine Mahoney was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She received her diploma in Fine Art from the Technikon Witwatersrand in 1991.the Johannesburg School of Art, Ballet, Drama, and Music. She now lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Justine explores the censored reality of her childhood growing up in 1970s Johannesburg, South Africa. Mahoney's works also explore childhood's inherent innocence and loss as she incorporates her memories as inspiration for her creations. Collages and sculptures utilize elements of modern media and African sculpture to grapple with her past. With her sculptures, she uses a small but mighty bronze army of soldiers, which are representative of the fears, hopes, dreams, and nightmares of children. Justine's artwork has been exhibited widely throughout South Africa and at international design fairs such as Design Miami, and the Salon Art and Design in New York City.
I had the pleasure of asking Justine about how her artwork has progressed since she became an artist, how she transforms shapes to address how identity is perceived, and so much more.
UZOMAH: If you could use one word to describe your artistic process, what would it be and why?
JUSTINE: The word 'katabasis' means "to descend into the underworld," and this is an important practice for me to engage with my subject matter. I write down my dreams, meditate, and make notes and drawings using the Jungian active imagination method, where you imagine going directly into your unconscious. This is where I find my material to work with.
U: How has your artwork progressed since you first became an artist?
J: I feel my work has evolved with each series I have produced. With Innocence, the forms I worked with were brought to their essences as if made by a child; with Tainted, I made crude collages to develop my forms dealing with various aspects of growing up in South Africa, bringing together the disparate nature of our culture; and with Mage, I used collage again, almost channeling or recognizing the extremely dystopian future we were all about to experience (my show opened two weeks before the pandemic hit). With VIGIL, I feel I have pushed the reset button. It feels like a new beginning for me to work with my unconscious to bring up archetypal forms common to all cultures.
Mother II courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
U: What do you like most about the art world today? What are some things you dislike?
J: I love that the art world is so wide open and limitless in terms of what one can investigate and experiment with. The borders are blurring more and more across all modes of art-making, and that makes things very exciting. I cannot say that I dislike anything about the art world currently - it is fascinating to watch it unfold.
The Wander II courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
U: How do you transform shapes to address how identity is perceived?
J: I try to find the common ground between all identities. I am continuously looking for what lies underneath and what underpins culture. I try to work with shapes/forms as they come directly into the unconscious field and portray them as I see them.
The Trickster courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
U: Is there any artistic movement or art period you would want to live in, and why?
J: Right now, it's the women surrealists that are resonating with me the most: Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, and the mystical work of Hilma af Klint from the early 20th century. I would love to be amongst these women to learn their practices and to immerse myself into their great imaginal space.
The King courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
U: Can you describe how mythology is interwoven in your work?
J: Mythology is infused into my work via my practice of katabasis, where I feel I am meeting the mythological directly and using archetypes as my guides. For example, while working with the 'Wanderer' archetype, I found a story in Clarissa Pinkola Estés book Women Who Run With The Wolves called La Loba. It's about a wolf woman who traverses the landscape to find wolf bones to bring back to her cave so that she can assemble them back into wolf shapes and sing life back into them. They regrow flesh and fur, and she can run with them, ultimately breathing life back into herself.
U: What made you want to use bronze as a primary material for so long, and what prompted the shift to clay for your latest body of work?
J: I have always worked in clay to form my sculptural pieces. I cast the work in bronze because I love the process of casting, as I see it as an alchemical transformation. With this body of work, I decided to show the clay as it is: in its raw form, directly from the earth. It speaks to my direct encounters with the archetypal forms themselves.
The Shadow courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild
U: What do you want readers of your latest exhibition, VIGIL, to know about your creative process when the idea for the exhibition came about?
J: For me, the creation of VIGIL was a mode of survival. I truly mean this. I went through a personal crisis together while the pandemic was happening to all of us. The dictionary meaning of the word 'vigil' is "watchfulness for any reason during normal hours of sleep.” With this body of work, I literally kept vigil over myself - a kind of watchfulness over my own psyche. I was trying to make sense of myself in a world gone completely off-kilter. It was during this time that I found Carl Jung's The Red Book, where he confronts his unconscious and documents it. I then used this as a guide for my own explorations. I wanted to "catch" the 12 archetypes that resonated with me most as precisely as I could see them in my mind's eye. I called to them as they ran across the inner landscape: stopping, hiding, moving, gesticulating, glitching out, mirage-like. Once the writing, rough drawings, and fast watercolors showed me who they were, I could then form and create them in clay. The entire process has been an active surrendering and a vital catharsis which I needed greatly.
Please visit the showcase here for more information about Justine’s latest exhibition. Information can also be found on the Southern Guild website here. Justine can be found on Instagram here.
