In the Studio With Mary Sibande

On Sophie, Colour, and the Democracy of a Print

Mary Sibande (b. 1982, Barberton) is one of South Africa’s best-known contemporary artists, having built her practice for close to two decades around Sophie - a sculptural alter ego modelled on her own body, who has taken on roles from domestic worker to ruler to general. Sophie made her first appearance around Sibande’s fine arts degree at the University of Johannesburg, and her first solo show followed in 2009. At Open City, Sibande was at the beginning stages of an etching, working with spit bite and colour applied directly onto the plate - a departure from the black-and-white etchings she’s more used to.

She was candid about the fact that this was new territory. For most of her career, Sibande has worked in life-size sculpture - pieces that demand her whole body, “your arms, knocking, pulling.” The shift toward two-dimensional, paper-based work, she said, has been underway for around two years now, and it asks something different of her: “these two-dimensional [works] require intimacy, because you go close to it - similar to painting, it requires patience. One mark at a time. You make a mark, you stand back… so that performance is happening in the studio.” She recalled submitting a print to a group show early in that shift and watching people walk past it, looking for a sculpture instead - a scale of recognition she was, by her own account, having to relearn.

The body of work she was making at Open City follows Sophie into leisure - a concept, she said, that came before the medium did. “Leisure for me means travelling, to places you’ve seen on TV or in a magazine,” she explained, and from there came an image she offered up as an example, thinking out loud: Sophie on the deck of a boat, sailing off somewhere - the Bahamas, to meet Rihanna, she mused, half-unsure herself - sending postcards home that read “wish you were here.” That idea, she said, only made sense on paper rather than as a life-size sculpture — partly because of what paper allows. “Paper… a lot of people can get that,” she said, tying the choice back to the idea of democracy: an edition of ten or fifteen prints puts a work within reach of far more people than a single, monumental sculpture ever could.

That instinct toward shared access runs through how she thinks about scale and audience more broadly. Describing an earlier, highly performative life-size installation - a single artwork built from around a dozen figures, including several dogs, vultures, and a life-size horse - she talked about wanting every viewer to get a full experience regardless of where they stood in the room, “like theatre… each and every person has to get an experience… by making sure the back is as entertaining as the front.” She drew a comparison to how musicians stage their shows, pointing to Kanye West: “you can hardly see him if you’re actually close to the stage - you get the pleasure of seeing him if you’re high up there, which is usually the other way around.” She called that inversion “the democracy of theatre.”

Colour, across her body of work, carries specific and deliberate meaning. “Each colour has a different meaning,” she said. The blue she began with speaks to the domestic workers in her own family during apartheid; purple marks her own position in post-apartheid South Africa; and a red body of work speaks to emotion - “how crucial emotions are in human existence.” She’s already looking ahead to a body of work that brings all of these together into what she called “a rainbow colour,” through which she wants to address South Africa’s ongoing transformation, and what it has meant to live through it.

Asked what Sophie means to her personally, Sibande answered without hesitation. “She has allowed me to look into my personal history,” she said. “If I was a writer, I would write about Sophie. But because I’m a visual artist, she has allowed me to make objects, visual objects, and tell her story.” Those stories, she added, aren’t only her own - they carry her grandmother’s dreams and her mother’s aspirations, folded into what she called “my way of asserting myself in the world.” Sophie, she said, holds two things at once: home and escape. “It’s that idea of taking a real story and taking it further, to a point where it becomes fantastical.” Asked, half-joking, whether Sophie is real, she didn’t resolve the question so much as describe where she’s headed with it - toward the point in the sea where no light can reach at all. “I want to get into that area,” she said.