Artist questions our place in the world — using fashion as the canvas

There have been many artists who look to morbid issues to create beautiful art. In SA, one of those artists is Paul Emmanuel, who has been putting the finishing touches to his latest exhibition, Substance of Shadows.

Through clothing and branding, Emmanuel creates artworks that question our role and place in the world — with fashion as the canvas.

Reflecting on the World War 2 bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Emmanuel was fascinated by the link between SA’s uranium production and the fateful event, especially the shadows and scars left on buildings and people’s skins.

Sourcing what is now the last roll of carbon paper made at a factory in Sebenza on the East Rand, we speak to the artist about how he brought trauma and triumph to life in an exhibition that has been six years in the making.

Memory plays a big part of your current exhibition; please tell us more about it.

I’ve spent six years scratching away at carbon paper with a small cutter blade. All of the works are made from millions and millions of scratches except for Rise and Falling which is a video artwork.

I liked the idea that the body and the skin is a kind of map of experiences. When you scratch carbon paper away, it has a very skin-like feel to it. It’s very fragile and it pierces easily — just like skin would. While it still resembles fabric the skin-like quality made me say of what happens to us when we experience some kind of traumatic event. It’s something that lives on our bodies.

Our memories are imprinted on us, just like the people in that blast in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There’s a museum with pictures of patterns from people’s clothes, graphic designs and prints, that are burnt onto their skin. And that’s what made me say of using carbon paper. It has that burnt-paper quality.

It's intriguing that you've included your mother’s wedding veil in the exhibition. Tell us more about the piece and how it ties into the exhibition?

Veil 1954 is a replica of her veil from when she got married that year. I made it while she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and I finished it a few months before she died. It felt very transformative for me because I felt like I was scraping away all its heaviness.

The veil has these outstretched arms, very much like the iconic image of the Virgin Mary embracing all of the children of the earth. I wanted to do something that spoke about her absence. That’s why there is no representation of her body. I wanted to create the sense that her body is there but it is not present.

You feature two jackets in the exhibition, what was the inspiration behind these?

The first is an executive business suit jacket, a size 52, and I remember that because I had to buy a fabric pattern and scrape away all the carbon until it was almost transparent. I’ve always been fascinated with ideas behind masculinity and how we present a particular image of ourselves to the world. It’s a kind of suit of armour on the battlefield of the corporate boardroom.

I wanted the smaller jacket to communicate with the other the way a father and son would. The design of the jacket is a school blazer and was based on my father’s school blazer. It amazes me because of how we get boxed into these different roles that we have to play from such an early age.

So much clothing pops up in your exhibition, what pushed you towards that?

Clothes are signifiers of what we want to project to the world and I think that nobody is ever exempt from that. Even the jeans or belts that we wear are symbols. Especially the labels that we choose to wear which you see in one of the works I called Branding where I bastardised this kind of Louis Vuitton wallpaper with World War 1 imagery and medals that were projected onto my face. We wear those brands to elevate ourselves above the rest. I was fascinated by how we adorn ourselves with different brands to project a certain image to the world.

You used a similar technique with the artwork featuring the naked body of your father. How did you go about putting that artwork together?

I was fascinated by lifeless bodies and so I watched an autopsy at a morgue in Braamfontein and it was a life-changing experience. It removes all your preconceptions of the sacredness of the body. It was a very visceral and sobering experience for me — very hectic.

The huge discrepancy between the adorned body and all of these brands and clothing items and seeing it completely naked without any agency or power was eye-opening for me.

I spent a whole year carving out that image of my dad. First my dad was very conservative. He was Mennonite, Catholic and Lebanese. He was 92 years old when I photographed him. It took about six months for him to agree because I wanted to photograph him with all of his clothes off. I wanted to make an art piece that made us say about the relationship with our fathers. I wanted people to say about whether their fathers would let them do something like that.

• 'Substance of Shadows' can be viewed on UJ’s Moving Cube virtual exhibition platform until August 2022. Visit movingcube.uj.ac.za