Artists We Love: Caitlin Mkhasibe

INTERVIEWED BY Michaela Stehr IMAGES Supplied

Cape Town-based mixed-media artist Caitlin Mkhasibe talks to us about her mindfully creative journey through collaborations, art and music.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your relationship with art. 

I’m a mixed-media artist and drummer based in Cape Town, focusing on our relationship to the environment and how that informs my anxious perspective of humans occupying outer space. I’m of dual heritage, born in South Africa to my late Zulu dad and immigrant British mom. While growing up, I travelled from Johannesburg to visit family in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK or KwaZulu-Natal so moving around different spaces seemed conventional. How some have treated my mixed race has made me feel like the James Webb telescope of human things, feeling outside of social interactions, observing them, perhaps sometimes as an ignored alarmist but invisibly tied to it all at the same time. Where I sit comfortably is not in one culture or the other, but in fragments of both and neither at the same time. I can sympathize with artists and folks who don’t align with pressures to perform any kind of one-dimensionality, where art is a safe space for its gentle inclusivity, where we can ask questions about pain and our cognitive dissonances with animals and our environment. The creativity of feminist artists, musicians and writers in sub-cultures has been an empowering friend.

You have quite a few projects on the go. Do you find that working on different things keeps you stimulated?

Yeah, it keeps things fun. Operating without traditional gallery backing, with support from online artist platforms has let me experiment in translating my ideas into various materials. As eclectic as my interests are, everything I do, to the best of my ability, has a common thread of development and integrity through using locally made, animal-friendly art materials, such as canvas and paints, supporting small businesses that produce locally sourced and hand make 100% cotton clothes or tote bags to paint on, independent fine art printers and local pin manufacturers.

You’ve done quite a few collabs. Could you elaborate on them?

In 2020, I had the wonderful opportunity to launch my artist collection for Cape Town-based, bespoke wallpaper company, Robin Sprong Wallpapers. The collection is about my love for nature and raises awareness of human-made noise pollution in our oceans, using mixed media like home-made vegetable and fruit inks for abstracted foliage, seen in Atoms and Vegetation, and animal-friendly inks and soy wax on paper, manipulated digitally to make the texture and monochromatic style of sonar or spectrographic imagery as a visualization of sound, seen in Jelly Fish Planet. What I like about Robin Sprong Wallpapers is that the prints are endorsed with both Greenguard Gold & UL Ecologo. RSW has international partners who print and install wallpapers in their respective countries, so global shipping is minimized. One of RSW’s partners at the time, NY and LA-based designer, Greg Herman (House of Herman), asked me to expand on some of my hand poke tattoo designs that he saw on my Instagram. They are now available as 1m x 1m canvas prints under fine art prints at robinsprong.com. Holding Space for Creativity was a remote, collaborative artwork made in 2021 with South African artist, Elize de Beer of Bookward Bound Bindery, who is now based in Ireland. This work is an amalgamation of Elize’s book-binding knowledge and my tattoo-styled digital illustration of our shared interests and the surrounding natural landscape where we studied fine art together in Cape Town. The cover was screen-printed with gold ink by Roxy Kaczmarek at David Krut Projects. The final books are beautifully handbound with a three-colour Coptic Stitching by Elize, with spine guards painted by me. The blank books serve as a reminder that art is necessary for our well-being. Since 2020, I’ve been collaborating with the International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists and Scientists (IASAS), a non-profit organization that spreads awareness on synesthesia – a cross-sensorial neurological phenomenon. I’ve either shared or made artworks at the organization’s two online symposiums on the intersection of sight and sound as simulated synesthesia. I joined their board this year with the potential to help in writing, artistic and curatorial roles, as well as finding synaesthetes and artists in Africa for collaborations with Nairobi Design Week and Journey Through the Senses. 

What does a day in the life of Caitlin look like? 

On a loadshedding-free day, I wake up around 6am, have a cup of tea, do a little at-home yoga and watch a bit of the sunrise. My partner (who’s artist moniker is helo samo) and I work from home so after we get ready and have coffee, they start their work day and all morning I listen to music or artist interviews while doing emails, website admin, packing orders for the courier to collect, writing about, photographing or editing video of artworks for social media. We have our lunch break either at home or pack sandwiches to eat at a nearby forest and watch the squirrels and crows. The second half of my day is practical work: planning or making new artworks, filming the process. Alternatively, practising the drums or working on music with helo. I try end my work day latest 6pm, if there aren’t any pressing projects that muddle the order of the day around. After dinner, I spend the evening watching stuff or read while helo makes art. Because of the difference in time zones, I occasionally Zoom someone I’m doing a project with in another country. Since the pandemic, hand pokes have been on hold.

Where do you look for creativity and inspiration?

On social media, I follow my favourite post-rock and drone/ noise/ doom/ post-metal bands. As well as tattooists, low-brow, street and album artists. I read sci-fi or horror graphic novels and books, watch A24 films, walk in natural spaces in Cape Town often and enjoy propagating my plants. Some visual artists:

• Caledonia Curry (@swoonhq)
• Danny Davies (@artofdannydavies)
• Robin Faye (@feralverdure)
• Matthew Glover (@sineateruk)
• James Jean
• Ethan McCarthy (@hell_simulation)
• Rithika Merchant
• Moebius
• Tann Parker (@inkthediaspora)
• Pat Perry (@heypatyeah)
• Pony Reinhardt (@tenderfootstudio)
• Adrienne Rozzi (@poisonappleprintshop)
• Shaun Tan (@shauncytan)
• Tyler Thrasher (@tylerthrasherart)
• Lauren YS (@squid.licker)

What’s your take on art and social media? 

It’s divided. On the one hand, we wouldn’t be having this Q&A without it. I wouldn’t have connected with or had exposure to so many influential international spaces, artists and musicians over the years. I think at first, it also helped marginalized artists, especially, queer black tattooists, bypass bias to forge spaces to be seen. On the other hand, social media no longer has an ease of use for creative communities and its discriminatory hindrances are a hard truth. I’m trying to move away from it through email newsletters, zines and my online store but keeping up with the people I follow outside of it is an impossible task. I’ve leaned on Unsung Art (Cape Town) for the past 6 years and Emergent Art Space (San Francisco) non-profit online artist platform for the past 9. I’m grateful that they have been getting my art out there through their websites and into exhibitions. EAS connected me to the 2021 Boundless Space… Burning Man x Sotheby’s auction in New York, that was coproduced by set designer, David Korins, for example. 

Do you have any exciting projects in the pipeline? 

IASAS will have a symposium in London in 2023, collaborating with Journey Through the Senses and the UK Synaesthesia Association (UKSA). I’m doing album artworks for a band in Australia but I can’t say more about that until their releases. Morning Pages (the band I play the drums for) has two albums to record, one with Dirk Hugo and another with Simon Ratcliffe of Sound and Motion Studios. We’ll collectively make the album artworks as all of us are visual artists.

How would you describe your style?

My art’s meditative mixed-media, monochromatic, surreal and abstract, whiplashing into figurative hand poke tattoos of nature. What little I learned of film photography in art school is used to depict it all in my online corner. Even though it’s devoid of humans through barren Bonstellian planets, it’s micro-macro in its ecological and feminist hopes that we don’t get to an irreversible doom on Earth. The moods start bleak but shift to antiapathetic. Think of the message behind the film, Don’t Look Up. 

Do you prefer smaller intimate projects (hand pokes) or larger scale works like the wallpaper collab?

I think both are unique. Having someone say they want a tattoo from me who trusts that I can do that for them in a safe space is so meaningful. I know how hard it is to find the right artist. Wallpaper has its magic too in that it can be a bold moment or a reverent nook in someone’s home – with the option to recycle it and repaint the once covered wall. I’ve been told my work is pleasant to live with because it’s meditative. A public space choosing my work to set a tone also feels like a very special statement to me on their part.

You work across so many mediums, and produce equally beautiful work across them all. How do you choose what to work on, when?

That is so kind of you to say. Thank you so much! Projects happen in phases. It depends on the urgency of their deadlines and if the people I collaborate with rely on me to finish pieces quickly. Managing, restocking or making new work for my online store or Unsung Art is always running in the background. When time allows, I’ll consider a new piece. I often launch something new before the end of the month. Other than that, I don’t know how my brain tetrises it all into place. 

What is your take on the future of art in SA? 

I mostly output my work in international spaces so I can’t say too much about it. Coming from the period of internet DIY artists and not from traditional gallery backing, it’s interesting to see the local adoption of online stores and art merchandise culture by establishments because of the pandemic (art prints on tote bags, for example). I hope the understanding of the need for this shift adds social value to the already existing affordable art scene and that there’s more momentum in looking at intersecting environmental aspects to art-making.

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