Hands Protection: Lucas Nkgweng

Commentaries by Pamela Allara, Mark Auslander, and Susan Platt

The Lockdown Collection: Lucas Nkgweng’s Hand Protection Series

Title: Hands Protection (Series of five unique monotypes)
Medium: Monotype with collage printed objects. 350mm (w) x 500mm (h) each.

Artist's statement; This series explores a combination of objects and multiple layers of my Monotype Printmaking processes. The work is inspired by the present global reaction that has psychological and economic impact caused by the COVID-19. South Africa, among other countries, was forced to stay indoors from Thursday, March 26, until further notice, as a National lockdown. The government has set and implemented the “Lockdown” regulations in order to prevent and combat the spread of Coronavirus. People have been advised to take precautionary measures, such as keeping distance from others, cleaning hands and disinfecting touched surfaces frequently, not touching eyes, nose or mouth, covering coughs and sneezes with elbow or tissue. 

As an artist and educator, through my work, I felt an urge to engage and encourage people to comply with the Government’s regulations to help flatten the curve. The Lockdown is a new reality that I have accepted and adapted to. It has provided me with an opportunity to reconnect with myself.

Pamela Allara: At the conclusion of The Lockdown Collection’s Aspire auction on April 19, 2020, a few last-minute additions were also sold, including 5 stunning monotypes with collage printed elements donated by artist Lucas Nkgweng.

The artist states that, ‘…through my work I retrace and reflect on my childhood journey which contributed significantly to my career and profession as an artist and art educator…I remember as a little boy, my peers used to ask me to create toy wire-cars to play with…This really unleashed my potential as an aspiring artist!”   His love for creating brought him from Limpopo Province to Johannesburg, where he studied at Artist Proof Studio. After graduating in 1998, Nkgweng began teaching there; currently, he is the First Year Coordinator and First Year Facilitator in Printmaking. In other words, Nkgweng has the challenging but rewarding talk of overseeing the progress of the 30 or so entering APS students each year.

In addition to his teaching load, he has continued to develop his own work. He writes that initially his art revolved around “socio-economic and political issues that affect my community on a day to day basis…[ Recently, however], I have opened myself up to a window of freedom where I express myself freely and tap into my subconscious.”

Lucas Nkgweng, “Road Crossing,”2001,etching,  28x 26 cm.

Nkgweng’s early figurative work, continuing  the legacies of both Township and Resistance Art, retains its power. For instance, in the etching, “Road Crossing” (2001), a ghostly figure wrapped in blanket and carrying a staff appears about to walk past us in the dark on what we sense to be a mysterious, somewhat ominous journey--in this instance to an initiation ceremony. The traditional rituals and the spiritual worlds of South Africans are embodied in this single figure, who we intuit will emerge from his blanket transformed.

The monotypes Nkgweng donated to The Lockdown Collection are initially more abstract, but they are equally rich in connotations. The layered images consist primarily of discarded rubber gloves and face masks. Thus, Nkgweng’s “Hands Protection” series, like Walter Oltmann’s wire sculpture “Frontliners” in the TLC collection, pays homage to the health care workers whose hands have soothed and cared for the bodies of those suffering from COVID-19. In “Light at Coronavirus Tunnel’s End,” an image of the virus, in red, is contained by the masks. But is it contained or escaping, ready to reappear once the lockdown is lifted? The series offers layered interpretations as well as layered images.

The used, scattered objects are indicative of the repetitive, exhausting labor endured by those directly confronting the virus. Because the prints initially require that we take the time to unpack these layered images, we are also encouraged to contemplate their significance. Worn by caretakers, they serve as roadblocks against the transmission of the virus more broadly. The raised gloves
in “Where Are You Going” and “Hands Protection” convey the warnings that no doubt have accompanied their care.  Ironically, the masks and gloves are often found discarded in parks and streets, their protective potential trashed.

All of the quotations in this text are from “LUCAS NGWENG: ARTIST STATEMENT,” shared with this writer on April 20, 2020.
__________________________________________________

 Mark Auslander:  Lucas Nkgweng's Mask-I and Mask-II are powerful interrogations and reassemblages of the shape of the face mask, now a globally recognizable image of  protection, however imperfect, in the age of the virus.  Both prints incorporate similar motifs: a blue and white face mask, attaching strings, a lighter lattice work evocative of the mask's breathable surface, a yellow field (perhaps signaling caution), a vertical form, partly or entirely brown, that might signal a human body or limb,  and a black and white intricate form that might evoke a crinkled face mask or perhaps the swarm of the virus itself.

In Mask-I,  the major brown vertical form has a single splotch of red in its upper center, perhaps signaling an infecting virus. The brown form bends, perhaps reminiscent of an elbow, into which we are now warned to sneeze or cough.  We see a small figure in the lower left, with an arm outstretched  towards the major brown vertical form. I believe we glimpse a squarish head on the figure, partly obscured by the mesh of the mask.  Perhaps we are meant to see a vulnerable patient being ministered to by a masked frontline health worker.  The blue and white face mask might even resemble the profile of a human face, looking down at the patient. Alternately, the blue and white mask might reference a vulnerable beating human heart,  perhaps evocative of the fundamental threat to all human life posed by the novel coronavirus.


I am especially struck by how these elements are positioned in the carefully composed Mask II. We see the blue and white mask at the base, and. above, a more detailed examination of the mesh of the composite nylon, through which strands of the attaching mask strings wend their way.

In this image, the limb like-form seen in Mask I I now changes hues as it rises, from darker, to lighter, passing through the  yellow field, a familiar sign of caution. At the very base of the brown form is an overlaying whitish element, perhaps a pathogen.  Perhaps we are glimpsing a figure in various stages of infection,  the darker bottom invisible to onlookers.  The top of the form, in a gunmetal gray, recalls he head glimpsed in Mask I in the lower left; it  might evoke a medieval knight in armor,  its defenses vanished, now shedding the virus swarm from its eye slit. 

We may even read the blue and white mask surrounded by the dark browns and warning yellow,  as an image of planet Earth, seen from space, a vulnerable blue marble in a dark sea of encroaching danger.

In "Hands Protection" (the title work of the series) the brown gloved hand becomes an active agent, not only protecting frontline workers but in halting the transmission of the virus by enforcing the lockdown orders. A single hand is held up, ordering the shadowy presence in the distance to stop and stay at home.  "Hands Protection" thus is a play on words; the hands are protected by the glove, and the hand itself protects all of us by stopping foolish behavior, and the virus, in its tracks. Yet, these actions  are not without risk: the left fingers of the gloved hand share the darkness of the approaching gloom perhaps suggesting, as in Walter Oltmann's "Frontliners," that the medical worker is already infected. Similarly, the face mask on the left is tinged with pink, a possible signal that its defenses too have been breached.






 A blue gloved hand also is held up in "Where are you going?"as a bid to arrest movement, blocking a looming dark shape that recalls the background of  "Hands Protection." The title might also have a double meaning.  The phrase is an implied imperative: you had best stay home, unless you have essential business to undertake.  Alternately, it could be read as a broader question asked to all of society: where precisely are we going as a nation or a community, when so many are left precariously at risk in township and underserved rural areas at a time of crisis?   Here, the white mask at the print's base and foreground is in distinct contrast to the approaching ominous dark mass, perhaps signaling the light of hope in a time of darkness/

Imagery of light and dark are explicitly played with in Nkweng's fifth, beautiful print, "Light at the End of Coronavirus' Tunnel".  A single bright red SARS-CoV-2 virus, with its distinctive protein spikes, is surrouuded by white (which Pam sees as a mask), within a large black mass. Perhaps we see a white blood cell from the human body's immune system attacking the virus. Suspended above are a protective blue and white face mask and a twisting string that perhaps holds the mask in place.  The patch of blue and white might be suggestive of hope, indicating that the storm clouds of the pandemic will finally break and that blue skies await.  The swirling brown, reds, whites, and black between the virus and the blue mask thus might herald the gradual dissipation of the pestilence.

Or perhaps not. At least to North Americans' ears, the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel" is invariably ironic, recalling its thorough discrediting during the Vietnam War by the Nixon administration, which often prematurely forecast the imminent end of that long running conflict. It may be that Nkgweng is sounding a caution against overly optimistic readings of our predicament.  The glowing red virus could be read as a burning fire smoldering deep within the crater of a seemingly inactive, steaming volcano, just waiting to release a second wave of infection --which was, in the case of the 1918 influenza pandemic, considerably more deadly than the first wave. The image could thus be read as an injunction to remain vigilant, lest we once more be consumed in the coming second eruption of nature's fury. 
_________________________________
Susan Platt: This art work suggest discarded masks, and although there is "Light at the End of the Tunnel" in the final one, I see this as the opposite as the virus lurks there ready to re emerge. In the idea of disposal lies the huge issue of re-contamination, and the delay in disposal, as health care workers wear the same mask all day.

Lucas Nkgweng, Mask-I (2020)

All I can think of in looking at these masks is the catastrophe in the US and around the world of the inadequate protection for healthcare workers who are forced to reuse masks and gowns over and over. Suddenly, two months into the epidemic, we hear that this or that place or designer, or person, is making masks, some ready "in a month". It is a truly horrifying  that rich societies are not only failing themselves, especially the US, but failing others. We should be supplying the test kits and antibody blood tests and masks and gowns around the world, instead we are trying to buy them from around the world. In the US our particularly corrupt capitalist health care system and mind boggling incompetence at the top,  means governors are competing with each other. I am not familiar with the South African health care system, since they have "lockdown" which is beyond "stay at home" and even "quarantine" perhaps, that the central government has been responding aggressively to contain the virus, even as we hear that the rest of Africa will be the next hot spot.