The Art of Performance is a monthly column written by Dave Mann, an editor and award-winning arts journalist.
On a busy Saturday morning, theatre-maker, writer, and visual artist Sue Pam-Grant is inside her studio, quietly working away as she does most mornings. Outside, cars and trucks struggle up the steep road, or speed down it. Lively chatter filters out of a coffee shop just across the way, and pedestrians amble along the pavement, lost in thought. All of this can be seen and heard from inside Pam-Grant’s studio-space – a street-facing store-turned-studio in Johannesburg’s Melville that the artist has occupied for the past ten years.
‘It’s a playful space,’ says Pam-Grant as she walks me through the collection of trinkets, prints, notepads, paintbrushes, and canvasses. ‘I like to think of it as a museum of curiosity.’
2019 has been a busy year for Pam-Grant so far. In addition to moving homes, she’s been working at the collaborative and interdisciplinary space, The Centre for the Less Good Idea as a collaborator on their fifth season, and wrapping her head around the start of a master’s degree at The University of the Witwatersrand. Much of what occupies the studio space, currently, is Pam-Grant’s own attempt to figure out the place of her work inside the theoretic framework of this master’s.
At the front of the studio, a long ream of paper hangs from the ceiling, covered in notes, thoughts, and references. Names of writers, theorists, and artists are dotted here and there. Curse-words and improvised thoughts stream down the page, sometimes circled and highlighted, other times scrawled over other messages. The paper, a written iteration of Pam-Grant’s process – stretches down from the ceiling, onto the floor, and towards the front door and, in this way, it’s one of the first things you are confronted with as you enter the space and it serves as an excellent framing of Pam-Grant’s current work.
To continue reading about Sue Pam-Grant’s current work, purchase the May 2019 issue of Creative Feel or, to continue supporting our role in the South African arts and culture sector, subscribe to our monthly magazine from only R180.00 to R365.00 per year! SUBSCRIBE HERE!
