multi layers of charcoal drawings and paper. She uses paper and fabric consciously breaking away from the hard materials of traditional sculpture. She deliberately rejects those masculine materials and shapes for feminine ones. She exchange her welder for a needle and thread to assemble her sculptures.
that she combines with animistic elements of African folklore’s mysterious deities and gods. By using haunting animistic images from folklore an unreal reality is formed that contains the movement between the natural and supernatural, and addresses isolation and threat. She creates playful childlike images that comes across as light and humorous but on closer investigation you will find a paradox in title, theme and mood that is far more threatening and unsettling.
“Paper is the source of All, the Plan, the Map and the Poet. It’s from paper that we got the Book, the Kite, and the Gods” (carnival song in Uruguay
REVIEWS
"Marais uses non-traditional materials to celebrate a non-western cultural tradition. No wonder we stop and gape at these beautiful, exotic and momentarily disturbing shapes and images." - Joel Blair for Solares Hill. Feb 2008.
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“The interior of West Martello Tower offered a sympathetic home to Anja Marais’s pair of suspended, tight-laced, full-skirted gowns. Constructed out of paper dress patterns and covered with drawings that illustrate an enigmatic folktale from Marais’s native South Africa, they suavely combined feminist and other political imagery.” -
Karen Wilkin for "Art in America" 2009
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"Other garden visitors were surprised to find me on my hand and knees, pervertedly looking under the skirts of Anja Marais' "The woman That Changed into a Tree." I was looking for some type of mechanism that might be moving the dresses but it was just the wind. And the effect was just as haunting as she intended." - Sara Matthis for 'Locals Guide' March 2008.
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