Stephne de Wet

Stephne de Wet is an installation and performance artist. She is currently (2020) an fourth year BA Fine Art student at the University of Pretoria practice her art making in Middelburg, Mpumalanga.  Her work is influenced through personal experience and memory of growing up in a Traditional Afrikaner Family structure. Her work acts as a form of rebellion or as a challenge to the structure enforced at family dinners. 

 Represented in this body of work are themes of violence and anger as directed towards (the artists personal familial situation) a specific familial situation. Ideas of distortion, resistance and observation are directed at the idea of the ‘perfect’ table setting to evoke raw emotions such as anger, discomfort and unsurety in personal memory. The conceptual framework of feminism is visually signified by the ‘bad’ or ‘incorrect’ embroidery of the work which represents the resistance of the traditional Afrikaans female skill sets. 

The youth in traditional Afrikaner families are often brought up to participate in patriarchal and hierarchical systems like table etiquette where the male is head of the household. In some households to be the main figure is an honour that should be earned not given  and within this body of work the precipitance of a main male figure is self-explanatory.

All the works remain in black and white as they act as a metaphor for how a patriarchal outlook has no space for grey areas. Black and white relates to the poetry that is the foundation to the video artworks.  The poems started as a form of journaling to relief the emotion of anger throughout lockdown with my Afrikaner family.