Katherine Bull

The drawing machine... Katherine Bull.

One chair for Liza, one chair for Irma.

Four hours of low-res high-concentration digital life drawing.

Sonya Rademeyer

The eyes are the windows to the soul (?)

Sonya invited a group of 20 somethings to partake in a visual experiment. She showed them images of paintings by Stern intermixed with other painters that portrayed war and violence. Their eyes were video recorded whilst they looked at the visuals. Unexpectedly strong emotional responses were observed in both the expressions and the feedback.

Ruben Gutierrez

Mexico to Cape Town.

How does one pay a 1-day visit across miles and miles of deep blue sea?

Ruben suggested a possible solution via email...

...Rendering Theoretical Commitments Visible.

Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor is a prolific artist. He settled into the library and made drawn responses to each and every Stern portrait. Below are some of the outcomes. To view all, visit immediatenonsense@yahoo.com

Jacques Coetzer

Saturday mornings are especially good for drinking coffee at some special little cafe...

Jacques used an unique system. He treated guests to home brewed coffee and biscuits and chatted about one of his latest projects: a functional coffee shop at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro as a sustainable business for the local community.

Seth Harper

Seth installed a portrait wall of 'the family' in various settings. Two of the brothers (on the chair) came along to observe...

He built a brand new member of the family from scratch in his characteristic style within the day residency period.

Niklas Zimmer

Niklas marked students' art theory dissertations, but paused to converse and have tea with visitors.

The camera shutter clicked every minute with mechanistic regularity:

420 photographs in 7 hours. Does human interaction adjust the flow of time?

Watch this space for the short film of the day.

Johan Thom

Some visitors are more demanding than others...

Johan posted 100 engraved razors, emailed a couple of instructions, and requested that I perform a randomly constructed version of the poem below...

"afloat in tethers row” (in memory of South African poet Ingrid Jonker) in three anchor bay
beneath an ever breaching wave
not of waternot of soil
but where drowning meets with chafe and heat
and open wounds still loathe to heal
awash in bugles coil with salt
yet pulsing far beyond our reach
others float like nesting crows
i knew you once or may yet still
in turn of tide
en masse
set sail
to bleached white sands
long exposed to sundrenched
cooled down by temperate flow
this shore is neither yours nor mine
to trample
touch or disavow
and castaway the chance to meet
amid ships afloat in tethers row

Lynette Bester

Post-It
Lynette arrived back in Cape Town from a collaborative residency in Cornwall at 08.10 and came straight to the museum, suitcase and all...

For the duration of the residency, Lynette communicated with friends and visitors on Post-Its and via sms. The conversations became visual fragments that invaded the space.

Barend de Wet & Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton

Double knit: a knitting performance in all the colours of the rainbow. Barend and Adrienne chose one of each colour double knit wool available and sistematically (over a month) knitted one colour after the other. As the colours multiply, the distance between them grows... The project continuous...

Abri de Swardt

Abri had many visitors whilst constructing his collage/performance Visitation. Here he is explaining his working method to art consultant Rose Korber. On Saturday 10 October the Visitation, based on Irma Stern's Water Carrier, attended the walkabout. Below: Visitation, the spirit of Stern, at the Zanzibar front door of The Firs (Irma Stern Museum).

photo: Stuart Buttle

Lien Botha

Lien Botha brought an African Grey Parrot named Coco with her on her visit. He whistled and watched as she installed the dado gray scale on the wall of the residency space. (The dado gray scale was used by photographers when developing their own prints as a guide of the tonal spectrum in the print.)

In other parts of the museum, she hid colour cards. People who found these were entitled to a free catalogue of her show Parrot Jungle, which is currently on at the PhotographersGalleryZA (Shortmarket Street, Cape Town). At the same time, it also forced visitors to engaged with the venue as a historic space. Two groups of students visited, and there was an intense discussion around her work.

Lien with the completed scale at the end of the day...

Francisca Sanchez

Francisca Sanchez posted 6 waterfalls for her residency (7 Oct). Here the paper construction can be seen as installed in the residency space...

View http://www.franciscasanchez.cl/ to see more of her work.