Anja Marais was born 1974 in a small town in the savannah of South Africa. Her childhood was nestled inside the cottoned pseudo-utopia of a segregated society. Seeking to pierce the evasive truth of a land operating under the rose she turned to art to shed light on the shadows of humanity and herself.
After graduating from the University of South Africa ‘s B.F.A. program, she immigrated to the United States where her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Marais has held residencies in Japan, including a Mino Paper Art Residency and the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon Residency in Korea.
She has been selected for programs like the Creative Capital Professional Development Program and the Enrique Martinez Celaya Summer Workshop in affiliation with the Anderson Ranch Art Center. She is also a recipient of the Florida Individual Artist Grant 2010 and won the best land choice award from Sculpture Key West in 2009.
Her work has appeared in publications, including: Florida International Magazine, Art in America, and Artnews.
She currently works and resides in South Florida.
about my work
My multi-discipline art projects is that of the perpetual out-lander, belaying a line between unreachable landfalls. I am mapping the space where the journey and the foreigner in all of us exist, that capacious interval, of which is and has no beginning, and which is becoming and never is.
The subject of man and animal in my work contains a physical remoteness by preserving the anatomy of melancholy and the elusiveness of the familiar stranger. The likes of the same unknown persons that travel pass us daily at a vis-à-vis distance, and with an unspoken pact of anonymity among us we transmit a harmonious tension of being simultaneously far away and yet close. This liminoid state offer us an escape to be suspended between cultures, gender and time.
I prefer to work with natural materials that have a narrative spirit; paper, sisal, jute, bamboo and rock. It aids in my experience to imagine the explorers of old moving across the uncharted sea, steppe, ice, desert and forest. I am exuding and re-occupying the space between sculpture and painting after the complete dissolution of their boundaries into each other over the last decades. This territory of my sculptures are enamored with the concept of place, including the possibilities of journeys made within it. A place not that of topos (a place to belong to) but of the somatic (a place that relates to our bodies).
The rudder of my art is the work and words of progenitors, Stanley Milgrim, Joseph Campbell and Rodin and the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They both well knew the conditions of the contemporary nomad in today’s neo-Pangaea – the concept of what they called the lines of flight – “From lines of division and separation to nomadic lines of flight – lines that carry us away, a flow of deterritorialization”.