We are excited to welcome our final artist to the Saudade project. Monique Prinsloo is a Fine Artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. After completing her Masters Degree in Fine Art (MFA) at Michaelis School of Fine Art in February 2012, she pursued a full-time career in the Film Industry as a Storyboard Artist and Creative Researcher. Recently she has resumed her Fine Art work, and continues to implement a photographic & illustrative based production in her artistic practice.
Monique’s MFA thesis, titled “Falling into Gentle Ruin”, focused on finding inspiration from a vast collection of found images, objects, and writing. As her thesis described it,
Each moment an image finds its way to my collection is an enchanted discovery. And each one of these anonymous objects in my collection is charged with an ethereal quality – at once delicate and unsettling, a place of stimulation and inspiration that has many parallels with and influence on past, present, and future. It is not my intention to over-interpret. My attempt is to imaginatively manipulate and transform these images, allowing them to speak for themselves, rather than divulge the didactic function of photography.
In doing this, Monique continues to arouse the viewer’s imagination by instinctively constructing imaginative accounts of what has taken place, and to some extent relive the experience and the moment she came across each of the images or objects in her collection.
Naturally her passion for photography has transcended into another dimension – that of collating images captured by herself. She is working towards a new body of work, where she is layering drawings that instinctively pair with each individual photograph. These works in progress form part of a series that took form whilst on an Artist Residency in Iceland (Oct – Nov 2013), and will hopefully be completed and exhibited in the near future.
Prinsloo has participated in many exhibitions, including most recently Fotostaatmasjien Group Exhibition (No End Contemporary, Johannesburg 2016), Watershed Group Exhibition (Erdmaan Contemporary, Cape Town 2016), and Preview to: Iceland – Reclaim of Form and Void (Grey Area Gallery, Cape Town 2014). She has won several awards, including multiple Visual Arts Grants from the National Arts Council of South Africa, the Ernst & Ethel Eriksen Trust Grant (2011) and the Jules Kramer Travel Award to the São Paulo Art Biennale in Brazil in 2010.
We are very excited to have Prinsloo as part of the Saudade Project. For more information about her and examples of her work, please visit her website.