Performance by Gabrielle Kruger: My home is my nest my body is my home

My home is my nest my body is my home is Gabrielle Kruger’s first Performance Painting since 2019, a second collaboration with renowned choreographer, Debbie Turner and esteemed ballet performers of Cape Ballet Africa.

The performance, which cross-pollinates painting, performance, installation and theater, sees dancers adorned in Kruger’s sculptural paint. The traditional visual language of painting is re-imagined into physical, moving form, through performative expression. Painting becomes alive through the movement of the performers bodies.

The wearable paintings turn the dancer’s bodies into phytomorphic creatures in Kruger’s imaginary “Garden of Metamorphoun’; a narrative populated by characters that blur the lines between human, animal and plant. Specifically, the Weaver’s Nest is used as a motif here, questioning what it means to make a home in this world.

Kruger’s idea of a ‘Performance Painting’ was first conceptualised in 2019 following an Artist-in-Residency at Nirox Foundation which culminated in creating the scenography and costumes for a theatre production of an African rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer NIght’s Dream, performed by students from The National School of the Arts. In the same year, Elana Brundyn commissioned ‘Gucci Garden of Eden’ at Norval Foundation; a Performance Painting with the Cape Town City Ballet with choreography by Debbie Turner. Kruger has since been expanding her Wearable Paintings as characters for her ever-growing imaginary narrative, The Garden of Metamorphoun.

About: Gabrielle Kruger's research-led, process-based practice redefines the conventions of painting through radical experimentation with the materiality of acrylics. She re-imagines notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ through laboratory-like methods of experimentation and inventive painting techniques that transform paint into sculptural forms and the physical act of painting into performance. Her ecological reflections question the boundaries between nature and artifice, inviting dialogue on material life and the Anthropocene; creating new mythologies for our contemporary era.