A woven, stitched, textile narration of the walls, doors, blooms and daily happenings in Botterblom Street.
WHY BOTTERBLOM STR
In 2024 we were invited by The Prince Albert Community Trust (PACT) to be their featured artist for the Journey to Jazz Festival, an annual festival which draws inspiration from the history, art, and natural environment of the Central Karoo.
As a team we wanted to create something to celebrate the everyday, showcasing our town and the people who collectively make up this place and get to call it home.
The pieces intend to encapsulate this concept of ‘home’ and how that looks, sounds and feels for each of us in the studio.
We then situated this concept within the broader context of the festival - what it hopes to achieve, who is leading its path into existence, and why.
The PACT Centre is situated on Botterblom Street, so we thought this should be where our contribution should be placed. The result was the making of 31 tapestries which has been our way of detailing the beauty of small moments that hold home together.
Cathedral of Everyday Arrangements
A SHORT FILM ON THE MAKING, MENSE & THINKING BEHIND THE BOTTERBLOM COLLECTION.
PROCESS & STORIES
For our tiny studio, this project has taken a year of constant making. This would be our first large body of work. It has brought us extraordinary joy and elevated all of us in the process.
The level of care, workmanship, threading, reworking, quietly weaving, unpicking, laughter, stories, assertions, explanations, and consideration poured into each work by members of our studio is what makes them so special.
Botterblom is a studio collaboration in the truest sense, every piece done with specific people, friends, homes, ornaments, belief systems, TV programmes, language, and gardens in mind.
Places in Space & Blocked Hues
Pipe Dreams
As a studio we are aware of how this is a departure from specific voices that have always been heard more than others and we are proud of the fact that this is a representation of the collective of our town and its creativity.
“It is not lost on me that Botterblom is not my personal lived experience, but it is certainly part of my community. It is where the women in our studio have grown up and now raise their families. If we were going to do this together, for PACT, this is where we all agreed the threads should be placed.
It is an honour to be part of this team of formidable women who in their own way have taught me more about making and why we choose to do what we do than any classroom or teacher ever has. Julle is die mooiste mooi – Thank you for sharing the way you see and walk through the daze” – Frances van Hasselt.
What do you think about at 3am when it’s so hot and you can’s sleep? Those nights when curtains hardly move from fatigue.
BOTTERBLOM IS A collaboration of hands, stories of place, and a pride in making mooi the cracks that others may see as washed out and in need of mending.
FUTURE FOLDS
The main aim of this collection is to showcase the beauty in everyday life. We hope to achieve this through an artisanal craft that stems from the landscape, animals, heat, and hands of the Karoo. We tell these stories using ancient fibre thriving in the belly of a fossilised seabed, pieced together through some of the oldest ways of making.
All of it encapsulates the things we believe should be carried forward into tomorrow: humility, humanity, authenticity, humour, kindness, community, nature and nurture – women’s work. Slow and considered making, making for a purpose, upcycling forgotten threads into roadmaps of tomorrow.
Our secondary objective is to give back to our community. When the collection sells, after recovering costs, we will share a dividend for our community by setting up a Fund for Women Artisans. The fund will support women artisans to keep the practice of making alive in this town and in turn give back to those still to come. Ultimately, we hope this collection opens a conversation in which we get to hear and see something old in a new way, differently, learn something, and maybe change just a little of how we engage in the everyday.
If nothing else, these works have transformed our studio. Every one of us. Thank you to the PACT team for this gift. Whatever we make from now on will hold the thinking and learnings of Botterblom.
Potted Luck
BOTTERBLOM
by Frances vH Mohair Studio
Frances van Hasselt
Katriena Kammies
Maria Lekay
Lina Bronkhorst
Monique Bitterbos
Gizella Arendse
Roos Lenders
Fabienne Gehrmann
Mariaana Konthea
Annie Mtonga
Mary Gumbo
Tessie Mgemezulu
Official Photographers: Luke Houba, Verity Fitzgerald & Sam Reinders