You can look at Barbara Wildenboer’s Artwork hundreds of times and identify a new detail every time you do. The South African Artists’ complex, labor-intensive paper sculptures form an intricate web of intertextuality and visual references. From homages to classic gothic artwork to ancient scientific tomes, Barbara’s collection explores the deepest corners of creation.
“I take things apart, I break them down, and I rebuild them again, so there is a constant push and pull between creating and destroying in my work,” Barbara says of her process.
Drawing inspiration from Mary Shelley’s seminal novel, Frankenstein, the result is a new kind of character study, a map of the fears, ambitions, joys, and horrors of the novel’s flawed but vibrant protagonists.
“Both Victor and the Creature inhabit dual positions of predator and prey and victim and perpetrator… As a community, we can’t turn a blind eye and shirk our responsibility to the less privileged, but often that’s what we do. We fear the monster in them, and they fear the monster in us,” Barbara says.
Barbara's paper sculpture Paradise Lost references Milton's seminal work that so deeply influences the Creature throughout the novel. The background depicts a muted heaven and hell, while the more vibrant foreground symbolizes earth and Paradise. Barbara's piece evokes religious symbolism while simultaneously subverting our ideas about heaven, hell, and our place in between. Included in the collage are Gustave Doré’s etchings, John Martin’s mezzotints, and William Blake’s watercolors.
“Barbara's delicate hand-cut sculptures are a combination of disparate parts into a layered body. Barbara balances artifact and origin, resurrection and ruin, beauty and edge, academia and art. Her cuts lead to unfound territory and her studies produce remarkable compositions that emerge from the page to honor the depth of Shelley's life-gifted Creature,” Bond & Grace Art Director, Maggie Lemak says.
In Meeting in the Mountains, Barbara evokes Victor and the Creature's conversation through the vehicle of the Sarracenia, a carnivorous plant particularly effective at hybridization. The Sarracenia forms a natural parallel with the Creature, not only in its fascinating genetic makeup but in that it traps and eats flies. The Creature, while vegetarian, has no issue murdering Victor’s family in his pursuit of revenge.
"I used the carnivorous Sarracenia plant as a reference to the idea of creating hybrids and new species, something that Victor dabbles with," Barbara says.
In Natural Philosophy / The Alchemists, Barbara meditates upon Victor's interest in Natural Philosophy that ultimately leads him to create the Creature. The hand-cut paper sculpture includes texts by Cornelius Agrippa, whom Victor references as one of his inspirations. The presence of owls, microscopic imagery, and eye-like shapes also create a commentary on sight and wisdom. Despite Victor's knowledge, he remains blind and ignorant of the danger of his actions until it is too late.
The Voyeur depicts the spring blooms that bring the Creature so much joy during his period with the De Laceys. The use of eyes in the hand-cut paper sculpture references how the Creature watches the family, particularly the old man who in addition to being ignorant of the Creature's observation, is himself blind. In this piece, sight is a source of both hope and judgment, causing us to question its reliability as a means of connecting with others. The sight of spring brings hope to the Creature, yet he is judged when the sighted De Lacey children return and find him with their father.
The Creation of the Female Creature is both frightening and fascinating, giving shape to the female creature Victor ultimately destroys. The hand-cut paper sculpture includes imagery from Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In stitching together these different influences, Barbara enacts her own process of creation not unlike Victor’s, reclaiming the body of the female creature as a site of both horror and feminine power.
Barbara Wildenboer is a South African Artist. Guided by intuition, she creates collages, photo and paper constructions, installations, and more. Her trademark ‘altered books’ extract and assemble the pages of old books to form sculptural works that symbolically relate to the text. Barbara is represented by galleries in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, Lisbon and Luanda. She received her MFA from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
