Jessie Mooy - her art and life

JESSIE MOOY

Contents

4. Curriculum Vitae - Jessie Mooy
4.1. Preferred medium
4.2. Education
4.3. Awards
4.4. Recent articles or books on the artist's work
4.5. Solo exhibitions
4.6. Group exhibitions
4.7. Public collections
4.8. Private collections
4.9. Commissions

5. Jessie Mooy's work
5.1. Ceramic sculptures:

5.1.1. Stoneware

5.1.2. Raku

5.1.3. Earthenware

5.2. Oils

5.3. Monotypes

Please go to http://photos.yahoo.com/jessiemooij for Jessie’s latest work.

Jessie Mooy is an artist who has specialized in ceramics since 1991. She is based in Port Elizabeth, situated in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. She is currently working in raku and earthenware. Before 1991 she painted landscapes of the Eastern Cape in oils.

Email: jessiemooy@telkomsa.net
Web site: http://members.fortunecity.com/jessiem
Please go to http://photos.yahoo.com/jessiemooij for Jessie’s latest work

Telephone/fax: +27 (0) 41 5812136
Cell phone: +27 (0) 83 2418634

Address: 19 Hillbrow Place, Walmer, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 6070

Reviews
Barry Ronge, Sunday Times Johannesburg, July 1993
(On the group exhibition "The Feminine Aspect of God" at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival)

Magic is a word so overtraded that it is almost risky to use it but the exhibition The Feminine Aspect of God is filled with an ancient vibrant magic that rises from the earth and moves to heaven through our intuitive spirit bodies.
...
Jessie Mooy's ceramics are sensuous and sacramental, filled with voluptuous natural forms, gilded and silvered and pulsating with ripe generative life.

David Edwards, "The Return of the Repressed Feminine" published Dec. 1993 in The Phoenix, Vol. 6, No. 3, by the Albany Museum
(A talk given at the opening of the art exhibition "The search for the feminine aspect of God" in the Standard Bank Gallery of the 1820 Settlers Museum, Grahamstown, on 6 August 1993)

For James Hillman, the Archetypal Psychologist, images are the irreducible matrix of the human psyche. It is images which motivate our behaviour and programme the quality of our emotional and motivational life from moment to moment. What depth psychology has shown us is that these guiding images may often be deeply unconscious and that much of the alienation that people feel is due to an alienation from this source of creativity and authenticity.

In most traditional cultures the shaman is a person who learns how to venture into the unconscious to meet and engage with this imagery source (for example in the form of mythic stories or in the form of encounters with spirit guides and deities), and in so doing to bring back to the people of the culture perspectives on the powerful unconscious forces which are at the root of cultural life. The successful shaman therefore must shuttle between two worlds. In this sense an artist can be a shaman and I have no doubt that the artists whose material is discussed here are shamanistic in this sense that they have realised in their painting and ceramics powerful guiding images which are the root of important cultural processes that are underway at present.

All art has a personal dimension for the artist who is inevitably working out his or her personal struggles and dilemmas. But the personal dilemmas are always embedded in universal dilemmas; struggles which many people within a culture are engaging in and working out day by day. The first reaction of many people to this exhibition was a refreshing feeling of meeting something familiar yet somehow lost, of meeting something that speaks to them in a way that much contemporary art fails to do. I believe that the reason for this is because it has that sort of archetypal significance. It is spontaneous transpersonal art, which recovers a vision of womanhood which is generous, fertile, sensual and has a self-authenticating self-respect, constructive potency and spiritual dignity.
This exhibition is described as a search but it is more than a search, it is a finding and a recovery.
...
It is this kind of systematic brutality against an ancient spirituality that led to respect for the divine feminine becoming deeply repressed in the collective unconscious of our culture. Within Catholic Christianity some of the old traditions survived in the Veneration of Saints and the Virgin Mary. The Protestant revolution destroyed much of what remained of the ancient earth religions.

Why am I telling this long story? Because unless we understand it we will not understand the significance of this exhibition. Jessie's Black Madonna recalls an ancient European tradition of the Black Goddess. She is black not because she is African, nor because she is of the underworld or because she is evil, but because she is of the soil, because she is of the fertile earth, because she remembers that the bodily fertility of woman, in menstruation and child-bearing and milk-giving, is somehow energetically connected with the fertility of the earth. Ralph Metzner who has documented the history of the split between spirit and nature in European consciousness, and from whom I draw much of what I have said here, tells us that there are still six black madonnas extant in European churches today. I find it moving that Jessie has made a black madonna for South Africa.
Jessie is a remarkable woman. She is a committed Roman Catholic and comfortable within that tradition yet she is a spontaneous nature mystic within whose being these ancient images of divine woman come flooding in. Jessie describes her Forest Nymph as a Madonna too. Her contemplative eyes speak of a direct access to the sacred; her generous breasts speak of an unselfconscious fertility. Jessie's comfort with this juxtaposition of the Christian Madonna and the forest nymph remind us of the deep roots in an ancient spirituality of the Christmas story and the devotional appreciation of the mother and baby image.

Each of Jessie's ceramics has its own story. Nonquese's Dream is based on the story of a Xhosa girl in the last century who had a visionary experience of all of the people working in harmony with each other and with the land. On the one side of the vase she is pictured with her eyes glazed in a trance-like state experiencing the vision of humanity flourishing in a gentle land with rich harvests living in harmony with each other and the natural world. But the dream is not realised, the people fight. They fail to respect nature or to live in harmony with it. There is famine and destruction. Many people perish. On the other side of the vase we see Nonquese looking at this destruction and weeping out the pain and disappointment.
...
I believe that these works are drawn from a hidden wealth at the mysterious heart of the planet's historical unfolding. These artists have let that source speak to and through them. Through being here reflectively with these works perhaps we can let that source speak to us too and guide us to find our own place in the challenges that face all of us as potential planetary citizens in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Robert Brooks, National Ceramics Quarterly No.21, 31 August 1992
Eastern Province Institute of Architects Merit Award for Ceramic Art 1992

Jessie Mooy made a beautifully integrated work called Queen of Sheba's Reliquary (purchased by the Durban Art Museum in 1995). It was a true reliquary in that you could open it and find mysterious objects inside. Again a wonderful way to depart from the brief. The box is covered with images with green the base colour so there is lots to read and look at. The technique was quite strange in that glazes were "runny" but did not overrun their boundaries - it reminded me of a classic line from 'Mcarthers Park" by Peter Webb as sung by Richard Harris "all that pale-green icing running down". This work drips beauty and good intentions and was as honest as the day was night.

Kin Bentley, Eastern Province Herald June 4 1998
Mooy exhibits at Cuyler St Gallery

The exhibition, at the Cuyler Street Gallery until June 13, consists of Port Elizabeth land- and cityscapes done in oils, pastels and monotypes, as well as oils exploring the history of the Great Zimbabwe ruins.

Dutch-born Mooy has had eight one-person shows in South Africa and has participated in 48 (now 55) group exhibitions, including the Cape Town Triennial.

Since 1997 she has set up a ceramic studio in Belgium where she makes raku sculptures for various galleries in Belgium, Holland and Germany.

She has worked on four public commissions since 1984, including five canvas panels for the J L B Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown, 24 quilt designs for St Bernadette's Catholic Church, Walmer, and huge monotypes for Telkom's head office in Port Elizabeth.

Kin Bentley, Eastern Province Herald June 5 1998
Artist inspired and assured

EXHIBITION of paintings, graphics and ceramics by Jessie Mooy (Cuyler Street Gallery):
FEW cities in South Africa have as intimate and visually exciting a built environment as Port Elizabeth. And Jessie Mooy explores its opportunities with an eye hungry to record unusual and unexpected vistas, helped along by an imagination which is able to transform what to us is an everyday scene into a timeless work of art.

The lower Baakens Valley is a key area for her, and in South End she exaggerates the height and gradient of its slopes to dramatic effect. The last remaining South End church forms a focal point. It stands atop a precipice below which stand row upon eerie row of high-rise buildings - more a symbol for the CBD than an exact representation.

Similar effects of perspective are achieved in another large oil, The Walk, which shows a girl and her dog walking along a path on the northern slope of the valley, across from that lonely church (obviously painted before South End became Legoland).

Another fine work, Settlers Park, captures the abundant vegetation of this green lung, seen - it would seem - from about the point where a high-rise apartment block has been erected in one of the city's most cynical and obtrusive developments yet.

Another splendid study of the city is The Quarry, a view of this landmark seen over that row of old terraced houses in Valley Road. The arrows created by the roofs of these buildings lead the eye upwards to the quarry, and thence to the assortment of buildings above.
A small pastel, View of Central from South End, is another amazingly good work, in more traditional mould. A large cactus occupies the foreground and behind it rises the skyline of the old CBD, with the Campanile and old Post Office tower prominent. This is a great piece of drawing - one of several in this medium on the exhibition.

Another splendid oil painting, this time a conventional landscape, is Kariega River, which shows a forest of euphorbias around a body of water, with the river meandering in the background. The Grahamstown Group for decades have used the euphorbia in dark, brooding compositions. How nice to see them painted here in light, bright colours which explore to the full their princely forms and interesting textures.

Her brushwork, whether painting broad areas like hills or fine details, is assured and inspired. This exhibition contains a wealth more of great merit.

Renee Oliver, Eastern Province Herald 3 March 1995
Ceramic artist's works feted

PORT Elizabeth's Jessie Mooy is one of 10 ceramic artists in South Africa to have her work exhibited at the country's first international biannual display, in Johannesburg.
Mrs. Mooy, a teacher at Lawson Brown, is a qualified sculptor and painter and began her career in ceramics just four years ago. Her unusual ceramic work was spotted in Johannesburg last year.

"It was after last year's exhibition that the organisers contacted me and asked me to display some of my work at the biannual. This is a great privilege because only 10 South Africans' works are on display, along with people from the whole of Africa, Europe, America and Britain."

Her most prominent work at the Africa Earthed exhibition is a majestic 1,8 metre high pillar cum candelabra called Ode to Eve. The massive structure, made in her Walmer studio during the December holidays, had to be fired in three stages.

"It's the biggest thing I've ever made. It has three parts - the base is made up of ceramic sculptures of nude women in all the stages of life - from puberty to pregnancy to death. The second phase is symbolic of the heavens and the spirit of women, and the third phase is abstract and in the shape of a woman's body. A large candle fits into the top of the structure symbolising the light which emanates from inside us."

Biography
Born in Amsterdam, Holland, Jessie Mooy moved to Pretoria, South Africa and later to Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province. She studied at the University of Pretoria where she was awarded a BA Fine Arts Degree and a Higher Education Diploma. She worked as a Heraldic Artist for the South African Bureau of Heraldry in Pretoria for a period of five years in the late seventies. Since then she has taught art at various Secondary Schools and also started her own Art School and Studio in Port Elizabeth during the late eighties.

“For a number of years Jessie concentrated on landscape painting, but since 1991 has been working increasingly and successfully in ceramics. Since 1995 she has worked and exhibited yearly in Belgium, Holland and South Africa. Her earlier work is characterised by the vibrant use of colour and especially her later paintings by the unique portrayal of the Port Elizabeth land- and cityscape. She is excited by the sculptural quality of the landscape filled with plants - the landscape, which dwarfs buildings, ruins and human figures. In Jessie's vision the temporary edifices built by human hands always seem to crumble into ruins or are represented in such a way that they become insignificant or fragile in the presence of an overpowering nature. Jessie's paintings often depict the landscape as being violated or wrecked by man, e.g. “The Quarry”, now in the permanent collection of the Nelson Mandela Art Museum where the mountain becomes a symbol of an open wound, a mutilated body without a heart. Her paintings also reflect an awareness of the tremendous growing force of plants which, shooting up irresistibly from the earth, in some of her works become such monstrous and menacing shapes that they threaten to devour the tiny human dwellings. The sense of alienation from nature that pervades these landscape paintings may be seen as establishing a link with Jessie's earlier work, especially with her "ecological" paintings.

The image of woman functions as a counterforce to all forms of alienation in her art, by virtue of the fact that woman is depicted as life-giving earth mother or as custodian of all life in nature. In her more recent ceramic work her continued interest in the creative aspect of the earth, plants and all it’s creatures is evident, not only in the medium, but also in the formal variety and strength of her works.” (Excerpt from “Artists of the Eastern Cape”, by Prof. B. Olivier: Dean, Dept of Philosophy, university of Port Elizabeth.)

“I have for the past years concentrated on raku sculptural work, but still work in stoneware and earthenware as well.” – Jessie 2005

“After having been confronted with Minoan and Egyptian Art in 2003, I realise more and more that there exists a certain timelessness and beauty in Art which rises above contemporary trends, styles and historical political climates. Egyptian tomb paintings and Minoan sculptures and ceramic vessels look as modern and fresh today, as they looked thousands of years ago. I am constantly inspired by these masterpieces of antiquity, while trying to capture this mysterious, elusive “factor X” in my goddesses.” – Jessie 2005

Jessie has participated in numerous group and a number of solo exhibitions since 1970, including the Cape Town Triennial, a landscape exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery and the Feminine Aspect of God exhibition in Grahamstown in 1993. She is an invited member of the GAP group. Permanent collections in which her work is represented, include the Rhodes University Gallery, the Rhodes Ichthyology Department, the Durban Art Gallery and the Northern Transvaal Regional Art Museum at Pietersburg, King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth as well as the Cuyler Clinic collection in Uitenhage. Jessie has received no less than five awards for her work in ceramics, including the Corobrik Regional award (Eastern Cape) for best entry in 1991

Quotes

"I paint what I see around me, emphasizing the eternity of nature against the mortality of man and the transitoriness of human structures."

Intuitive Woman - "Living in a world devoid of spiritual aspirations and where the importance of material interests is stressed, I believe that the female is the natural medium to invoke in order to guard the great mysteries of the unknown. She has to weave together the reality of our conscious life and the mystical, intuitive and divine part of ourselves which is an element of nature."

"My work is influenced by Heraldic, Byzantine and Greek art, as well as flowers and my early doll paintings of the eighties. In 1991 I returned to the medium of ceramics and became interested in the vessel as a sculptural shape integrated with figures, plants and flowers and animal life as well as freestanding structures. I use clay directly and spontaneously, integrating the decoration and relief work while the shape is built."

Curriculum Vitae - Jessie Mooy

Preferred medium
Ceramic sculpting. Also monotypes and oils

Education
BA Fine Arts and a Higher Education Diploma, University of Pretoria

Awards

1991	Corobrik Regional Award for ceramics
1991, 92	Goodwin's award for ceramics
1992	Corobrik Highly Commended Award
1992	Kenzan Highly Commended Award
1998	First National Bank Vita Craft Now Highly Commended Award

Recent articles or books on the artist's work

1988	The Dictionary of South African Painters and Sculptors, by Grania Ogilvy, published by Everard Read, p. 457
1988	Cape Town Triennial, Rembrandt van Rijn Art Foundation.
1992	National Ceramics Quarterly, Sept 1992, No. 21
1993	The Phoenix, Magazine of the Albany Museum, Dec 1993, Vol. 6, No. 3
1994	A selection of Eastern Cape Artists, compiled by Helena Theron, text by prof. B. Olivier
1995	Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, Published by the Transitional Metropolitan Council, Johannesburg
1995	Insig, April 1995
1998	The Collector's Guide to Art and Artists in South Africa, Published by the South African Institute of Artists and Designers, compiled by Tai Collard p. 116
2003	The Collector’s Guide to Art and Artists in South Africa, compiled by Clifford Collard p. 178
2005	SAAID – South African Art Information Directory, p.21

Solo exhibitions

1983/1988 Eastern Province Society of Fine Arts Gallery, Port Elizabeth

1986/88 SA Arts Association, Pretoria

1986 Potchefstroom Art Museum

1992 Grahamstown Arts Festival, Fringe

1998 Cuyler Gallery, Port Elizabeth

1999 Galerij Exelmans, Maaseik, Belgium

2000 Gallerie de Witte Arend, Utrecht, Holland

1997/2001/2003/2004 The Cape Gallery, Cape Town

2005 Exhibition at 19 Hillbrow Place Port Elizabeth

Group exhibitions

1982 yearly till-2000E.P. Society of Fine Arts, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth

1984/96/2004 Grahamstown Arts Festival

1985/89 Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg

1988 CAPE TOWN TRIENNIAL (toured all major cities in S A)

1985 yearly till 2001 GAP Group P.E

1998 GAP Group Tour(Grahamstown,Alice and Port Elizabeth) PE/Bloemfontein/Kimberly/Cape Town

1991/92 APSA, (The Association of Potters of South Africa) Pretoria

1992/95/98 ALBANY MUSEUM, Grahamstown (98: The History of Pottery in the Eastern Cape),

1992 THE FEMININE ASPECT OF GOD EXHIBITION, Grahamstown Art Festival.

1993 Standard Bank Gallery, Grahamstown

1994 Gallery on Tyrone, Johannesburg

1995 SA CERAMICS Festival, HONG KONG

1995 Durbanville Cultural Soc, Durbanville CT

1995 THE JOHANNESBURG INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL

1995 yearly till 2005, Sculpture Exhibtion Cuyler Gallery, PE

1997 Gallerij van den Elshout ,DE HAGUE,Holland

1997 Gallerie Rive Gauche, MAASTRICHT, Holland

1999. SA Arts and Craft exhibition, The Castle, Cape Town

1998 yearly till 2004 Galerij Exelmans, MAASEIK, Belgium

2002 Potterie Galerie “Het Oude Dorp” Amstelveen, AMSTERDAM, Holland

2002 Cuyler Street Gallery Port Elizabeth, with Jennifer Crooks

!999 yearly till 2004 Galerie Demi-Jour,AMSTERDAM, Muiden Holland

2004 “Changes” exhibition, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum. PE.

2004 “The Potters of Madiba Bay” Grahamnstown Arts Festival, curated by the Nelson Mandela Art Museum

2005 “Dig This” Holland Tour exhibition of works by “The potters of Madiba Bay” curated by the Department of Cultural Affairs, Holland and The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum.

2005 "Celebration of Life" Montage Gallery, Walmer, Port Elizabeth

Public collections
Durban Art Museum
Northern Transvaal Regional Art Museum, Pietersburg
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth
Rhodes University, Grahamstown
Cuyler Clinic, Uitenhage
ABSA Bank, Johannesburg
Telkom Head Office, Port Elizabeth

Private collections
Both locally and overseas - London; Amsterdam Utrecht, Netherlands; Maaseik, Belgium; Sydney; Hong Kong; New York; Marbella Mallorca, Spain; Portugal; Germany

Commissions

1984	Life Cycle of the Fish, JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology, Grahamstown (five canvasses)
1993	24 panels for St. Bernadette's Catholic Church, Port Elizabeth
1996	Huge "Satellite Dish and Earth" monotype, Telkom Head Office, Port Elizabeth
1997	"Windows" monotype, Telkom Head Office, Port Elizabeth