Artist Profile - Gina
Gina van der Ploeg is a sculptor, textile artist, and farmer from Cape Town who wanted to bring her personal brand of artistry and overall creative work to the wider community by looking into her life and her mediums of choice. XCIV’s Rebecca, using familiar spaces for Gina, sought to create a perfectly balanced artistic and narrative flow to portray the artist’s life and work. The aim was to show intimate moments of work and materials.
Gina wanted this piece to be accessible, visually dynamic, and intriguing. Her art is centred around the body, from the labour it performs harvesting and growing to the way her whole body is involved in weaving on the back-strap loom. Thus, her work encourages an empathy and engagement in the viewer that is experienced through how their own bodies relate to, navigate around, and often touch her sculptures. Taking an age-old tradition of making clothes, vessels, and sacred objects, she pushes the act of weaving beyond function, creating forms that are both familiar and strange, thus calling to embodied practices and bodies/objects in motion.
Through XCIV, this video project was personalised and designed specifically for the artist, thoroughly showcasing her work, person, and enthusiasm. Rebecca was perfectly suited to create this piece. Her strengths and passion for this project allowed for a seamless collaboration that ultimately created a sensitive and beautiful artists profile for Gina that they were both were overjoyed with.
