Sue WilliamsonA Chair for Ray Alexander, 1990-1992
Ray Alexander was one of the founders of the Federation of South African Women, and a lifelong trade unionist. In 1941, she helped launch the Food and Canning Workers Union, which fought for the rights not only of workers in the fruit canning industry, but also of fishing communities along the coastline.
In 1990, as part of a project carried out during an artist residency at the South African National Gallery, Sue Williamson worked with Ray Alexander to make a photographic portrait of her based on a polaroid photograph. Two years later, when Williamson was asked to make a chair for a charity art auction, she chose to honour Alexander’s reputation for listening and helping people to solve their problems by creating a chair on which anyone could sit to converse with her. The text above the chairs is taken from an article about Alexander in Learn and Teach, a struggle era magazine founded in 1982 for people who wanted to learn to read and write and speak English. Part of the installation is a portrait of Alexander from the All Our Mothers series.
In 1990, Sue Williamson was offered the groundbreaking Canon CLC500 Co- lour Laser Copier on loan for an artist residency at the South African National Gallery. As an artist trained first as a printmaker, Williamson immediately realised the potential of the machine to act as both a camera and a printing press. The copier would add each of the four layers of colours one by one, so interrupting this process and manipulating the original master image lying on the glass screen as it was being copied could lead to unexpected results. Each one would be different. Williamson stamped each one of these unique prints with a rubber stamp which read ‘ORIGINAL PHOTOCOPY 1990’. A polaroid photo of Ray Alexander was the source of one of these experiments, and the resulting sequence portrays Alexander first seated on a chair, but gradually becoming an essential feature of the landscape.
