By: The Division of Communication & Advancement

Alice is a sculpture of body casts taken off an elderly lady who lived in the Brookshaw home in Makhanda.  It is one of the artworks Christine Maree made for her Masters in Fine Art exhibition, completed in 2008 under the current HOD of Fine Arts Maureen de Jager's supervision. She later taught Sculpture in 2009 as de Jager’s sabbatical leave replacement.

She is sitting on a wooden chair with her hands down at her side. Like other works that formed part of the master’s exhibition, her dress does not fit her. She sits awkwardly on the chair, restricted in the dress that exposes her shoulders and legs. Alice is cast in crystacal, which gives her a stark white appearance. Her clothing is made of fibreglass tissue and fibre seal. Thus, her dress has a ghostly colour and is almost translucent in places at one time. The dress, however, has yellowed with age, much like the yellowing of old fabric or paper.

The initial interest in this exhibition and, by extension, this artwork lay with an image Maree found of two girls from the 1850s. They are dressed up for the photograph in matching Victorian dresses. Maree was so taken with this image that she wanted to reconstruct what had been photographed. She recalls: “The idea that these children have grown up and most probably died is what is fascinating about such images. I can access them only as ‘this child’ in the photograph; I can never know them beyond the immediacy of this eternally frozen moment. In a strange reversal, I sculpted these young children as elderly people, as if imagining the future of the two young girls and projecting onto the photograph the future that it disallows.”

The process Maree used to make the work involved taking partial body casts of elderly people - some as old as ninety-three. She approached the subjects at the old age home, and after explaining the process of taking these casts, a few volunteered. Maree used skin-friendly silicone (called ‘Body Double’), which picks up extreme detail; as the skin of elderly people is commonly wrinkled, this material was ideal. However, this process requires the person being cast to sit still for an extended period. As the subjects are frail, she took moulds of them in parts and, therefore, moulded the limbs, the front of the neck, shoulders and back, and the face in separate mould pieces. “Though these casts were taken from a live person, they became a kind of death mask,” she said.

As a photograph captures and immortalises its subject by casting and reproducing Alice, Maree has achieved the same: both venerable records of a time that no longer exists. Maree proudly concluded: “The photograph suggests a dislocation between past and present in much the same way that the cast sculpture of the elderly does. It captures an image or form of a person as they are in a particular moment, thereby locking their image into a frozen present.”

Alice is exhibited at In Conversation: Four Decades of Artworks by The Rhodes University Fine Art Department as part of The National Arts Festival programme. The sculpture has been loaned from the collection of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum.