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Rosie Mudge (b. South Africa 1988) received her BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. During her studies she was awarded the Simon Gerson prize for excellence (2013 and 2012). In 2013 Mudge was selected for Between the Lines - an international symposium with the Hochschule fĞrBildende KĞnste in Braunschweig, Germany - facilitated by Candice Breitz as part of the German/South African Year of Science.
Mudge also works with video, sound, photography, installation, sculpture and drawing. “I work with materials that I find resonant - from nail polish, glitter, YouTube clips and silly string to resin, automotive paint, and glitter glue. For a long time I wasn’t sure how to use these materials because girly, adolescent and intimate things aren’t allowed to express the same serious concerns as paint and sculpture. They are reserved for the personal reflection or impressions of journals and love notes. But now a lot of what I do has to do with incorporating the viewer into an intimate experience or engagement.”
Made from nail polish and glitter glue on a grand scale, Mudge’ s paintings take something that usually only exists in small and contained supplies and expands it to the surface of her canvases. After initial experiments applying nail polish directly onto canvas, but feeling limited by the scale those materials allow, Mudge learned that car paint and nail polish share inherent properties. She has thus employed the durable material of auto-mechanics rather than beauticians to reach the required scale of the work. Mudge’s material interest in the ‘girly’ space of creativity (glitter glue and nail polish) and that translation into the more industrial and traditionally ‘boy-ish’ space of car paint and large abstract artworks, foregrounds the way thin king and imagining is constrained by language and institutional or societal structures. The material play in Mudge’s works alerts to the gendered characteristics of such language. It also denotes Mudge’s philosophy of making works of art from processes of creativity where works evolve in the act of making and through the act of making work through creative process enables Mudge to explore ideas before they become confined by language.
Solo exhibitions
2018 In my room with Mazzy Star, SMITH, Cape Town
Two-Person exhibitions
2019 Two Trees, Collaborative exhibition with Sitaara Stodel, SMITH, Cape Town
Group exhibitions
2019 Rendezvous II, SMITH, Cape Town
2019 Borderlines, The Third Dot, Mauritius
2019 Psithurism Daor Contemporary, Cape Town
2019Secret GardenArt on Avenues, Stellenbosch 2018 Rendezvous, SMITH, Cape Town
2018 New Romantics, Barnard Gallery, Cape Town
2017 Salad, SMITH, Cape Town
2017 Out of Nowhere, SMITH, Cape Town
2017 Folly, SMITH, Cape Town
2016 Arcadia, SMITH, Cape Town
2016 Current, SMITH, Cape Town
2016 From Whence They Came, SMITH, Cape Town
Art Fairs
2019 FNB Art Joburg, SMITH
2019 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, SMITH 2018 FNB Joburg Art Fair, SMITH
2018 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, SMITH
2017 FNB Joburg Art Fair, SMITH