Tactile textiles

The urban inspiration behind Yda Walt’s hand stitched material masterpieces

  

Walk into Yda Walt’s Auckland Park studio and you’re greeted by a sea of buttons, materials, cottons and threads in every colour imaginable. The artist and designer sees downtown Johannesburg as a veritable “treasure trove”. When she’s not perusing President and Diagonal Street, buying material for her artworks, then she’s quietly sitting on a street  corner, photographing urban street life as it passes her by.

All of the images depicted in Walt’s canvasses, bags, cloths and ceramic ware are based on real life scenarios. She always starts her inspiration with a photograph from her now ample archive of images, and from there uses her artistic licence to (literally) stitch together a colourful collage that invariably evokes a typically South African scene.

Whether it’s a woman carrying a bucket of water on her head or a man patiently waiting for a taxi, the two-dimensionality of the bold felts she uses are perfectly complimented by the three-dimensionality of the found objects she attaches to her canvasses.

There are probably as many stories behind the artworks as there are layers of material. The dominos that have come to be her signatures of sorts, for example, Walt buys from a shop often frequented by sangomas. She explains that because sangomas are after specific numbers only, she gets the remaining unwanted dominos for an absolute steal. The same goes for the broken neon rulers she hoards away in her studio, as well as the plastic belt buckles and various other odds and ends.

“The thing with going downtown is that you never know what you’re going to find,” she confides. “And you cannot go with a specific purpose; if you go looking for something specific you will probably never find it, you have to just stumble upon things. Sometimes buy things I love, and they sit here for a while until I find the right place for them.”

From taking the initial photographs to drawing her images and producing linocuts of them, ready to be printed, every step is labour intensive and done by hand, but therein lies the charm.

“I’m changing the way that I’m working –   I actually don’t want to become a factory and I can see that it could easily happen,” says Walt, who has recently been commissioned by Wedlandts to produce a series of neutral coloured canvasses. “I love being hands on, and I definitely don’t want to be just a manager. I would rather employ people to take some work home, sew it and then bring it back.”

In a country suffering from such high unemployment levels, Walt has found a way of helping out by hiring unemployed women to help her with the hand stitching on her artworks. At the moment her works are currently sold in a few select stores around Johannesburg and Cape Town, two prominent Johannesburg stockists being Imagine Nation Homeware at 44 Stanley and Service Station in the Bamboo Centre in Melville. She will also be exhibiting her work at the Gabi Gabi showcase at Decorex this year and hopes that the exposure will see her colourful creations popping up in more outlets.

This article was first published in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Wednesday 3 August 2011. 

For more information on Decorex, visit www.decorex.co.za. For more information on Yda Walt, visit www.ydawalt.co.za.