Maureen Quin is 90 years young. At present, there is an exhibition of her works at the privately funded GFI Art Gallery in Gqeberha. It is simply called Selected works from my years of sculpting.
In the programme notes, Quin said:
This exhibition, the last in my 90th year, is not a retrospective but rather a collection of selected works from my years of sculpting. These sculptures, which may have been overlooked in previous exhibitions, have brought me immense satisfaction both in their creation and in the experience of revisiting them.
I was fortunate to join Quin for a walk-through of the exhibition on Saturday, 15 February 2025.
Quin said her idea has always been to create “shapes in space”. The viewer has to interpret her shapes and absence of matter.
She desires viewers to engage with her work, and she is happy when someone does not immediately understand her sculptures.
That is why she elongates some elements in her work. These three pairs are lovers. Note the long limbs and the long necks. Quin says the long neck has two functions. Firstly, it is aesthetically more pleasing to elongate the neck. Secondly, a neck shows emotion. A drooping neck shows sadness; a proud neck is straight.
At times, she will bulk up her work in unexpected places. The idea again is to challenge the viewer to interpret the extra bronze which fills what would otherwise have been a space.
Quin is able to create realistic work. Her bust of Mandela is a good example of such work. Even here, the spaces do a lot of talking – in combination with her realism.
The GFI has another Mandela sculpture from Quin. It shows the leader quite realistically portrayed, but elongated, larger than he should be next to the child who accompanies him.
Quin seeks to engage the viewer emotionally; she wants her work to generate a story in the viewer’s mind. This image was commissioned by a young woman after her father passed away. One can see the figures moving apart, but they are still touching, still lingering before the final farewell. The two heads bent backwards signal an intellectual connection as well.
She likes small heads, because they look good on a big body. A head is merely part of the body and the neck, which interest her more than the head itself.
Someone asked whom she got her inspiration from. She answered that all the classical artists, and all previous artists she has studied, are “accumulated inside her”. But, she said, by now she has hopefully found her own way of expressing her art.
Artists who stepped out of the box have always been vilified, said Quin. But think of who the artists are that we admire? Those who dared to challenge the norm are the ones being remembered.
She led us to a group of more abstract pieces. Guinea fowl woman was an important piece, as it was created after a long stint in France. Back on African soil, Quin found herself connecting again with Africa and with nature, realising again that while she had enjoyed Europe, she’d never be able to relate to it completely.
Guinea fowl woman was the first piece she created after the sojourn, and it led her to explore the relation between human and animal forms.
Then came two works which Quin described as “seminal” in her career.
She said that in France they had done many life drawings, and the models mostly sat in chairs.
She began working on Ruler (in the middle of this picture), with his muscular frame sitting on a chair. Somehow, a human head did not work on him. But then she tilted the neck and gave him an oddly shaped head, which “made him look like a sad lama”.
His queen followed. Queen, also seated on a chair (on the right), was the first sculpture she gave horns to. The horns mimicked the chair, but, more importantly, horns are beautiful. Quin says the horns of impala and buffalo are “gorgeous; they are works of art in their own right”.
We then moved to a number of sculptures celebrating the human body. The first was Jade, named after the model with the same name.
Jade, the person, was flown up to Alexandria to sit for a commissioned piece.
They began working on the copper wires that give structure to the piece on the Friday. Saturday was spent creating the image. On Sunday, Jade flew back to Cape Town.
Quin loves the structure of the body. She says the tension created at the joints is wonderful to work with. Shoulders are important. She also loves “legs and knees. Knees are wonderful things!”
Her collection of ballet dancers has been created to celebrate the sheer joy of movement to music. Quin says she wants her art to stimulate the viewer’s own thought processes.
The centrepiece was created from a photograph of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev dancing. The pair enthralled audiences. Quin wanted to capture some of their magic.
The final part of the tour took us into a room Quin referred to as “works in progress”, where we got to see the various stages of her creative process.
She says she has to sketch something to know what it really looks like. The sketches on the wall had come about in an interesting way. Many years ago, she cut a photograph of two sumo wrestlers from a magazine. One day, when she had a mental block, she threw a whole lot of papers on the floor. The sumo wrestlers caught her attention.
Again she pointed out the importance of the joints – how they hold together muscles; legs and arms create tensions, points of interest she can work with.
Quin began sketching the sumo wrestlers as intertwined bodies. As she worked on her sketches, Russia invaded Ukraine. The superpower trying to overpower a neighbour added something to her sketches, giving them a partly political tone.
The final results were no sumo wrestlers, but bodies with tension between them. The viewer should observe the spaces between the bodies and fill them with their own ideas.
The drawings help her understand the structure. She often places pins at certain points, because then she can measure the limbs and scale them correctly for the final sculpture.
After the sketches, Quin creates the armature, for which she uses copper wire. Then only is she ready to apply the clay.
The final sculpture is then shipped to a foundry where it is cut up, cast and welded together again.
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The exhibition is on till 17 March 2025. Entry to the GFI is free. Most works on exhibit are for sale. In the room with the works in progress, two videos play in loops. Each video explains a part of Quin’s creative process.
See also:
Ongewone ontwerpsentrum ook tuiste van ongewone installasies
