The Threads That Bind Us

Embroidery Magazine, 2004. Robyn Sassen

“Only connect”, were the immortal words of E. M. Forster. How comfortably and ubiquitously it fits the work of Kim Lieberman, a Johannesburg-based contemporary South African artist.

Lieberman began her art education in the late 1980s at the Witwatersrand Technikon in Johannesburg by what was then, one of the most potent triumvirate of artists that this country has been heir to: Alan Alborough, Willem Boshoff and Marc Edwards; artists dealing with concept, form and awareness in a manner unique and central to a burgeoning South African identity.

The philosophy of the school of fine arts at the Wits Technikon is “accepting that students have a whole life of experience, and we encourage them to build on it”, Edwards told art critic Anthea Bristowe in an interview in Lieberman’s catalogue Blood Relatives (2000, Camouflage Art, Johannesburg.

Lieberman chose decisively and spontaneously in developing her work, which reveals the unique vision of an independent intellect. She enjoyed frequent overseas travel, during her childhood and as a young woman, which made the postal art of Alighiero e Boetti a viable post-graduate research interest for her. The threads of communication that often accompany travelling became cornerstones to her work.

She began creating postal installations in the mid-1990s. Like John Cage’s conceptual poems in meaning and language through James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Lieberman perused the global map for ties to bind her work, sending post restante envelopes to every place she had visited during her lifetime.

Poste restante is a system to enable travellers to collect mail from post offices wherever they may be. If not collected, the letter is returned to the sender. Inevitably, most of Lieberman’s letters returned, and she developed ‘postal drawings’, where the letters sent would be designated by a shape on the map she’d drawn.

A comfortable and rather synchronous mix of chance and event created a body of work which felt to be honest as it was beautiful in its simplicity. In 1999 Lieberman was awarded an Ampersand Foundation fellowship, which gave her three-month-long access to a flat in Manhattan, New York, to develop her repertoire. Serendipity characterised this opportunity.

“A button had come off her leather jacket and she bought some silk thread from a haberdasher to sew it back on. When she had finished… Lieberman put the… thread down on a sheet of blank stamp paper she was using to make collage stamp works. Weaving the thread through the perforations seemed obvious”, (Bristowe). And from this rather commonplace turn of events, a body of work developed which is Zen-like in its deliberate and peaceful structure, but challenges the core of modernist hegemony and remains unique.

The working principle that Lieberman adopted was to weave a silk thread through the perforations between government revenue-sized blank stamps, both horizontally and vertically. Like knitting, the principle is repetitive and therapeutic, and the completed work is a hybrid between tapestry and modernist gesture is deceptively passive, in its meticulous correctness.

On closer perusal, the dynamic of these cross-hatched threads is rich, visually and conceptually. Colin Richards, a Johannesburg academic observes, with reference to Amazon.com : “… our interconnectedness seems to be about distance close up. About working on location that shifts incessantly. About information as experience. In this work we can link the dots between forests, books, information and… the entire culture ecologies we inhabit. The wired world is now that of the indefinite globalisation of infinite localities” (Blood Relatives). The work comprises nine sheets of conjoined stamp paper, sewn in myriads of different shades of green; an aerial map of cultivated lands; a network of contingencies.

Lieberman doesn’t come across as an activist in her individual passions, but as one mollified and stimulated by the give and take and play that her meticulously worked, but never heavy works, provide. Clive Kellner, a Johannesburg curator, observes: “The male modernist artists who spearheaded Modernism and its reductionist qualities did so with little or no reference to artists of colour or women…. it furthered Western concerns of essentialism. One of the formal properties utilised in the construction of this predominantly male genre of painting was the square, and more particularly, the grid… the artist’s… stitching… on stamp paper with thread ruptures the male modernist grid” (Blood Relatives). Metaphorically, literally.

Lieberman’s grid as backbone to her work sets up a polarity which locates her within modernist practice and feminist ideology. She talks of Kabbalistic numerology in establishing decisions and constructions in her work that bring the work a philosophical set of values, sometimes hard to reconcile with on a purely art critical platform.

The sewn stamp as a unit of meaning and measure has become central to her work in evoking communication for her. “I have a fascination with the consequences that follow a single action”, she says in her catalogue, Every Interaction Interrupts the Future (2003), “I allow myself to dwell in the sheer wonderment of the simplicity of this notion, the reality of effect. Yet, despite this simplicity, it evades our perception. The exact unfolding consequence of an act cannot quite be traced. At most we can make crude associations between our more obvious actions—hardly recognising the subtle, yet perpetual ripple of effect that is the result of every interaction”. Sewing thread between pre-established perforations sets up networks of possibility that are visually beautiful and conceptually potent.

In 2003, Lieberman exhibited a new series of work on perforated stamp sheets. She continues to sign her identity with a cross-hatched sewn stamp, but she paints with oil paint onto this improvised support. She uses the detritus of perforations in her compositions. She has made the humble stamp into a powerful icon of order and disorder, interconnection, law and chance, predictability and randomness. She represents the silhouettes cast by humanity: pregnant women, social icons, family and friends… They’re all linked intrinsically to one another: the links may feel obscure, but based on Lieberman’s established iconography and history, they’re together through synchronicity, chronology, and the threads that bind us all.