Dr Louisemarié Combrink
North West University, Potchefstroom Campus
Oh, and she fell in the garden
ABSTRACT
For this submission, I made a sculpture using found objects (kitchenware and toys, some broken) to create a female persona. She has a black eye, and the title Oh, and she fell in the garden refers to either excuses made by victims of GBV, or lies told about how victims sustained their injuries by perpetrators of GBV. The use of discarded objects of a domestic nature plays on notions of being discarded, and of being constituted of a version of domesticity that is adopted to play into the demands of abusive partners. Using toys and other objects allows for these objects to become metaphors of enmeshment, brokenness and confusion.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Louisemarié Combrink holds a PhD in History of Art from the NWU. She is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus. She is also the subject chair of the subject group History of Art and the programme manager for the MA in History of Art. Her research interests include visual narratology with particular emphasis on installation art, as well as practice-led research and gender studies. She exhibits frequently, and her current fine art interest is driven by themes of conflict, war and GBV.
She has been a reviewer of DHET-related creative outputs since the early 2000s. She has supervised 20 MA-studies in fields such as photography, painting, art theory and 3D animation, as well as 2 PhD-studies. She is also a practicing artist and has curated a number of national exhibitions.
Dr Combrink has delivered numerous conference papers, nationally and internationally. She has published accredited articles in national and international journals, as well as numerous other publications. She is also a frequent speaker at events such as art exhibitions. She serves on the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Humanities at the NWU and on VUT’s Visual Arts Advisory Board, and is the chair of the Visual Arts Commission of the South African Academy for Science and the Arts. She is also a GBV survivor.