Collapse: A Conversation
with Ledelle Moe by Sarah Tanguy, Sculpture Magazine march 2007
Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, Ledelle Moe currently spends most of her time in America making her work and teaching. In 1994, she graduated with a degree in sculpture from Technkon Natal, and became a founding member of the FLAT Gallery, an artist initiative and alternate space in Durban. That same year, a travel grant enabled a move to the United States where she completed her Master’s Degree at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Recent exhibitions include Socrates Park and Pratt Institute, New York City, Anderson Gallery, Des Moines, Iowa, the Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden, and KZNA Gallery, Durban. Although the use of concrete in combination with human and animal forms has prevailed for the last fifteen years, she feels that she’s only begun to explore the history of her homeland and understand its profound complexity. Fiercely psychological and ruthless in execution, her sculptures erupt from the cataclysm of bipolar forces into an edgy yet fluid balance.
ST: Let’s start with an overview of your work.
LM: Even though I’ve been in the United States for eleven years, South Africa has remained the primary context of my work, and I return home annually, like an animal migration. I have a different relationship to the country now, but my work stemmed from a very subjective understanding of my surroundings. In 1989, when I was studying at the sculpture department in Durban, my country was on the cusp of political change; it was a shifting social environment. There was a lot of debate about content and how a work could have social relevance and be a weapon of the struggle. A wonderful man, O.B. Sachs, wrote in his book Spring is Rebellious that people are going to make things no matter what. It’s like plants growing though concrete.
That’s when I found the animal to be a very emotive metaphor for the prevailing anxiety. I started to use concrete with the animal form to create an evocative surface texture and narrative that reflected my personal feelings and my larger environment. I worked through a series of animal pieces that dealt with different power structures—the victim and the victor, the singular and the multiple. As the animal forms have progressed over the years, I’ve been able to focus in and pull back from different experiences, which is literally evident in the use of scale. It’s either huge and monolithic or tiny and many-faceted.
ST: Let’s consider Thrust (2003), a massive, writhing amalgam of indeterminate form. How does Thrust compare to Memorial (Collapse), where one of the heads taken from a photo of a young man massacred in Liberia, and Congregation?
LD: Thrust was a piece I did in D.C., and was a return to a work I created in Durban, which was a pack of dogs in conflict with each other as though they had been backed into a corner. It was very specific to the violence catalyzing change in the country at the time. The change was essential but very difficult. I applied the concrete to the armatures in a very rough and aggressive way, implying a sense of decay to a solid form that was both impermanent and permanent.
In my work, the themes interweave and overlap with each other; none is specifically chronological from beginning to end. Collapse is also an old idea that goes back to my early undergraduate days. Collapse is literally a collapse of the form as in these latest portraits or the animal form itself. It’s also about the collapse of power structures that I was responding to in a personal and a political way, more personal than political. Later, it became apparent that these images might imply something larger—the collapse of monuments outside of my own understanding, the collapse of heroes, and at the same time, the desire to create permanence out of the fleeting nature of existence. Death is a recurrent subject. It’s an understanding and acceptance of the life cycle and reflecting that through the materials yet wanting to hold on to memorializing. A friend of mine said recently that I needed to make these things so that I could remember; they were like immovable boulders that I couldn’t pass beyond until I articulated them. It’s my way of understanding things.
Congregation is about a retrieving. It’s happened very laterally, instead of working on one singular huge project, which is the way I’ve tended to work. I was carving a small head, and my friend and colleague, Jeff Spaulding, came into my studio, and said, “This is beautiful, can I have it?” I answered, “Sure.” And because he was appreciative of it, I made another one. And it grew from there. The work was something that you could hold in your hand and it felt different from having to climb over it, to battling with it. As this modular congregation evolved into place, there was a certain resignation in being unable to focus on one thing to understand the whole.
ST: What about individual differences—they weren’t made from molds, were they?
LD: No, not at all. I worked on this piece with my friend and colleague, Jessie Bowers, for a long time both here and in South Africa. It became a ritualized event of sitting and taking concrete that was fairly hard but not completely set and carving out different faces. In the process of doing this, I put them into boxes, and believed that I was making pretty much the same face over and over again, until it was time to put them up onto the wall, and I discovered that they were very, very different, different in scale, different in temperament. So this piece is much more autobiographical in a way that it tells the story of where aggregate is from, the mood, the nuance and the gesture of each head.
ST: Are they sightless or are their eyes closed?
LD: Most of them have their eyes closed. That was an intuitive decision that came mostly from not wanting the portraits to be confrontational and have them able to be looked at. I found that this was true for the larger ones too. People felt that they could go into a place and observe someone in a state of intimacy. Being with someone in his or her quiet space, who continues sleeping, implies a level of trust; it verges on an erotic intimacy.
Ironically, Congregation agitates people a lot more than the big pieces do. While the big pieces act like caves where you can go into and find shelter, these faces seem quite menacing.
ST: Do you make preliminary drawings?
LD: I draw almost everyday if not while stuck in traffic, then on the back of an envelope or a Xerox in my sketchbook. It’s a way of documenting people I’ve seen and don’t want to forget. I find a lot of joy figuring out that the strange shells that we look through and inhabit. But when the drawings stray from being portraits, they sometimes can go into the fantastical; that’s when dream images of the human and animal crossover. I’ve articulated a lot of them in drypoint etchings.
It’s been interesting psychologically to observe how we see the human form in everything—a lamppost or two dots on a curve make a face. You can roll a lump of concrete around for a while and end up with one of these organic forms. I feel the process is very primal, very tangible. A consistent given in all of my work is that it’s a solitary act, short of working with my friend and colleague, Jessie. It’s a very trust-based ability to work with other people.
ST: Tell me a bit more about your technique.
ST: In the large pieces, the concrete is applied to the armature and then carved, which creates an elephant-like skin and texture. With the small ones, the concrete is placed into a plastic bag left to sit for a couple of hours and then carved while still green. It’s a wonderful to hold the concrete on your lap and carve, like playing with beach sand. When it’s too wet, it’s very crumbly and an accelerated erosion happens, and when it’s hard, the chisel mark is more evident. So relative to how long the concrete has been left to sit will yield either a resistant surface or a very, very soft surface, which adds a textural and material gesture to perceiving the human form.
I spend a lot of time with concrete. I love the smell of it and my tools look a certain way as a result. It’s my equivalent to watching TV.
ST: I’m curious about your choice of concrete. It’s a natural material some twelve million years and produced out of intense geological changes. I see a parallel between it and the theme of social upheaval.
LD: An enormous amount of stress is involved in mining the minerals out of the earth in order to create concrete. It goes through a blast furnace and it is separated from what it was, and when you add water, it catalyzes back to what it was, evoking a romanticized birth, death, and resurrection.
Concrete is fascinating in that it comes from the earth and the aggregate you use really changes its color, texture and feeling. When it finally is pulled back into its original nature, it becomes something that we readily understand because we are surrounded by it. Concrete and water are consumed at almost the same rate around the world. Conceptually, I like concrete as an industrial, cheap material. And that’s what Congregation is also about: taking a given and transforming it a little bit while staying out of the zone of the precious. The figure and narrative are very difficult subjects to pull off in a digital age, and my practice is a direct and deliberate regression to a fossil-like, mud-like old state.
ST: Let’s return to Collapse. The #23 hexagram of the I Ching, also called Collapse, argues for overthrow as the natural progress of societies and personal affairs, and that discontent will lead to upheaval. Would you elaborate on your concept of collapse, and perhaps, the next step, healing.
LD: I think of collapse as a midpoint. Something must have been standing in order to collapse; something must collapse before it becomes a ruin. There’s always an attraction to things in construction or destruction. When things are in place, they are taken for granted; or they are precariously in place temporarily. What fascinates me the most is the point when things are balanced just for a while before tip over again. Without talking about it in the larger, political scheme of things, which I’m not able to do, I believe the South African context casts a light on my identity and on how I how I fit into the world. It affects how I carry that memory and baggage with me. Recently, I’ve been drawn back to make work there, to get my fingers in the dirt there.
I feel reconciliation is possible, not through any doing of my own but through the surrender of people to the loss of loved ones where there is nothing they can do about it. So Collapse is about loss.
ST: With regard to the idea of the memorial, I was thinking of the shell and the bigger heads. When you see a shell in nature it’s because a life form has left it; so I wasn’t sure if this is something you considered or had to do, because they are so big.
LM: It was a technical solution to the weight and size. I really wanted to create an enormous sense of volume like a giant boulder or landscape, where you would discover the face later. After a couple of earlier pieces where the segments were too heavy to move, I struck a deal that I would only make these three portraits as big as I could pick up on my own and bolt back together. What I found really appealing, and it seems that other people did too, is the blackness of the hole created by the large portraits. People would find the face, acknowledge it, then go to the hole and want to climb in. It’s amazing how solid these concrete shells looked and weren’t actually; it creates this tension of form.
I don’t think that artists really know what they’re doing until they’ve finished. Other people do the clarification. Those who’ve climbed in have said, “The quality of light is beautiful; it sounds great in here.” It definitely draws people in, if not psychologically then literally.
ST: How about irony? I keep imagining a faint yet persistent wailing coming from your work.
LM: I think that trying to create a human form from a more permanent material is an old, old instinct, and because we’re soft and mortal, that this will last a little big longer, but not that much longer. My work involves a sense of history that is much more romantic and heartfelt than ironic and encompasses natural wear and tear as well as manmade.
ST: Are there artists that you feel a special affinity towards?
LM: The German Expressionists impacted my thesis and undergraduate work. I tend to look at old sculpture, including Olmec colossal heads and other eroded, old things. Goya is one of my favorites because he never held back on talking about death and confronting us. On a psychological level, William Kentridge is my hero.
Congregation moved the content into a different zone. In trying to capture a crowd, it relates more to painting and caricature like a Daumier. It also made me think of Bosch and religious artists, in terms of the heads creating different hierarchies relative to our verticality: if they’re high up, they seem higher in rank; and the way they cast shadows, they appear ascending or descending. I started to wonder where we find the horizon line; and how does this horizon line differ from the horizon line of the larger pieces.
ST: Do you see your creations as surrogates or a type of self-portrait?
LM: I see all of the work, from South Africa until now, big or small, animal or human, as a bi-product of living. I am very grateful to be able to do it and survive. I don’t know what I would do otherwise. These things don’t replicate me or anyone else; they just give me a way to live my life. They give me structure and meaning. But once they’re done, they can go because I want to do the next lot.
Recently I heard about a Nigerian artist who sculpts concrete portraits of the recently deceased as memorials for their family members. I really get excited when I hear stories like this. I was born into very oppressive years, and it’s a struggle to find a place. My techniques, my methods are very primal ways of working without talking.
I think sculpture is such a universal language where communities form around a common purpose. This really holds true to Congregation. A lot of people understand congregation as a religious get-together but it’s not really. When two or more get together there’s a whole different energy than being alone. Surrendering to that and understanding community have caused a shift in my perception.
Art historian Sarah Tanguy is a curator and critic in Washington, D.C.